Natural Disasters as Teachable Moments

One of my goals as a middle school teacher is to help the kids understand empathy.  This is a very difficult thing to do with 12 and 13 year old kids.  It is normal for kids of that age to think about themselves and only themselves.  It isn’t because they are selfish, it is just where the kids are developmentally.  

Last year the world suffered a horrible disaster when Japan was hit with a large earthquake just off of their coastline.  This earthquake led to a horrible tsunami, which caused massive amounts of damage and casualties.  The most severe issues were with the damaged nuclear power plants that leaked harmful radiation that could affect people for generations to come.  

This, of course was an ideal time to teach kids about a tsunami, talk about the affects, and bring empathy into play all at once.  I did this with the use of technology.  Not surprisingly the media was all over the disaster and we were able to actually watch some live footage in class with kids.  At first they thought that the waves that were coming in were cool, and they talked about how fun it would be to float down the streets on inflatable tubes and play in the water.  Then as cameras rolled and showed cars being smashed into peoples homes and entire areas being destroyed it became very quiet.  The kids realized how big of an issue this was as it got more and more serious.  We discussed it as a class, and showed them some youtube videos.  The kids came up with the idea of collecting change and sending it to Japan to help with the people that lost their homes.  We made up some signs and collected some jugs for change and set up a table in the lunch room.  Kids were extremely generous.  In just a few days we were able to raise around 200 dollars.  Then the student council matched our efforts.  We researched a few charities that were set up for this specific cause and donated to the one we liked the best.  The money that we raised probably didn’t make a huge difference in the effort, but it was a huge step in making the kids think about others before themselves.