Sunday, March 29, 2009

I stole an idea from one of you....

... and it worked.

The idea was to modify board games to demonstrate some kind of inequality.

Hubby came in and facilitated a poker game. The students randomly got cups of M & Ms they were supposed to use as poker chips. The cups had vastly different numbers of M & Ms in them. Also, Hubby gave a pretty brief set of instructions as to how to play.

Of course, the point was to demonstrate a couple of ways in which people are unequal -- both in financial terms and in education. The assignment was to make a connection between the game and affirmative action.

Most of them got it -- and more than a few recognized how it might be the case that affirmative action makes things more fair.... or, at least they could see how it might be justified.

So -- to whomever inspired me -- THANKS!

2 comments:

Pilgrim/Heretic said...

Dunno if this is the post you were thinking of, but Bardiac wrote a great post with a similar analogy based on Monopoly, which I found immensely helpful, here.

Bardiac said...

Thanks :)

The analogy came from an anti-racism workshop I attended called Dismantling Racism Works.