One Teenager at a Time by Kari O'Driscoll

Author:Kari O'Driscoll
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781475851472
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Lessons

Comparison as a Form of Self-Judgment

“Self-love has very little to do with how you feel about your outer self. It’s about accepting all of yourself.”—Tyra Banks

Objective: Students are taught to become aware of how often they compare themselves to others and how this impacts their feelings of self-worth. They will learn to identify examples of comparison in their daily lives and talk about ways to mitigate the effects of judgment on how they see themselves.

Tools:

• Discussion Prompt (5–10 minutes of introduction, 20+ minutes of discussion)

• What Makes You Unique? activity (10+ minutes)

• Appreciating Your Body meditation (5 minutes)

Discussion: Let’s talk about judgment. How often do you size yourself up when you walk in a room—generally without even realizing you’re doing it? How many times do you rethink your hairstyle or outfit in the morning? Is it fairly common for you to compare what you said in class to what someone else said? Do you mentally beat yourself up because you think you could have been smarter/funnier/quicker? Do you sometimes gloat because you see yourself as better looking or more athletic or more popular than other kids?

Our brains are designed to judge situations and people, and unless we take the time to stop and recognize that we’re doing it and assess whether it is actually useful in any given situation, it gets more and more automatic. It becomes the backdrop of everything we do, despite the fact that the purpose of judgment is to discern whether a situation is safe for us. What we’ve evolved to do is turn that judgment on ourselves, and it becomes destructive to our sense of self.

Discussion Questions:

• Ask students to talk about what it feels like to judge and be judged. Are the two feelings different? How would students describe each feeling?

• Prompt students to calculate how often in any given day they see and hear people being compared to each other. Can they cite examples at home, at school, and in the media? What about literature or sports?

• Can students identify places where they can just be who they are without being judged? What is it about those places that make them so easy to be in? What would it take to create more safe places like that, both for themselves and others?

Activity: What Makes You Unique? (see Appendix A)

Meditation: Appreciate Your Body

We all spend a lot of time and energy critiquing our bodies. As teenagers, most of us spend a lot of time looking in the mirror, cataloging the things we would love to change—even just a little bit—and paying more attention to the things we don’t like than the things we do. This meditation is designed to give you an appreciation for the things we take for granted every day.

Sit in a comfortable position and close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths in and out to settle in and clear any random stray thoughts you’re having. Starting with your feet, think about what they do for you on a daily basis. How they squeeze into your shoes or take a beating on hot pavement or sand when you go barefoot.

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