Character Education
“Respect”
Defined: Showing regard for the worth of someone or something. Pride and belief in one's self and in achievement of one's potential. Concern for and motivation to act for the welfare of others
Purpose: Students will be able to explain how their personality can positively interface with others of different values and views. Respecting oneself and their peers, leaders, and community.
Materials: Personality test, Color test results
Lesson One:
Step 1: (5 minutes) Introduce yourself.
Step 2: (5 minutes) Introduce the topic and hook them into the topic.
Option 1: Story on Harriet Tubman: Excerts From “The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” by John C. Maxwell…. Fee free to paraphrase
If you had seen her yourself, your first reaction might not have been respect. She wasn’t a very impressive-looking woman—just a little over five feet tall, in her late thirties, with dark-brown, weathered skin. She couldn’t read or write. The clothes she wore were coarse and worn, although they were neat. When she smiles, people could see that her top two front teeth were missing.
She lived alone. The story was that she had abandoned her husband when she was twenty-nine. She gave him no warning. One day he woke up, and she was gone. She talked to him only once after that, years later, and she never mentioned his name ever again afterward.
Her employment was intermittent. Most of the time she took domestic jobs in small hotels: scrubbing floors, making up rooms, and cooking. But just about every spring and fall she would disappear from her place of employment, come back broke, and work again to scrape together what little money she could. When she was present on the job, she worked hard and seemed physically tough, but she also was known to have fits during which she would suddenly fall asleep—some coming even in the middle of a conversation. She attributed her affliction to a blow to the head she had taken during a teenage fight.
Who would respect a woman like this? The answer is the three-hundred-plus slaves who followed her to freedom out of the South—they recognized and respected her leadership. So did just about every abolitionist in New England. The year was 1857. The woman’s name was Harriet Tubman.
While she was only in her thirties, Harriet Tubman came to be called “Moses” because of her ability to go into the land of captivity and bring so many of her people out of slaver’s bondage. Tubman started life as a slave herself. She was born in 1820 and grew up in the farmland of Maryland. When she was thirteen, she received the blow to her head that troubled her all her life. She was in a store, and a white overseer demanded her assistance so that he could beat an escaping slave. When she refused and blocked the overseer’s way, the man threw a two-pound weight that hit Tubman in the head. She nearly died, and her recovery took two months. At age twenty-four, she married John Tubman, a free black man. But when she talked to him about escaping to freedom in the North, he wouldn’t hear of it. He said that if she tried to leave, he’d turn her in. So when she resolved to take her chances and go north in 1849, she did so alone, without a word to him. Her first biographer, Sarah Bradford, said that Tubman told her.
I had reasoned this out in my mind: there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death. It I could not have one, I would have the other, for no man should take me alive. I should fight for my liberty as my strength lasted, and when the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.
Tubman made her way to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, via the Underground Railroad, a secret network of free blacks, white abolitionists, and Quakers who helped escaping slaves who were on the run. Through free herself, she vowed to return to Maryland and bring her family out. In 1850 she made her first return trip as an Underground Railroad “conductor”—someone who retrieved and guided out slaves with the assistance of sympathizers along the way.
Each summer and winter, Tubman worked as a domestic, scraping together the funds she needed to make return trips to the South. And every spring and fall, she risked her life by going south and returning with more people. She was fearless. And her leadership was unshakable. It was extremely dangerous work, and when people in her charge wavered, she was strong as steel. Tubman knew escaped slaves who returned would be beaten and tortured until they gave information about those who had helped them. She never allowed anyone she was guiding to give up. “Dead folks tell no tales,” Harriet Tubman guided out more than ” she would tell a faint-hearted slave as she put a loaded pistol to his head. “You and on or die!”
Between 1850 and 1860, Harriet Tubman guided out more than 300 people, including many of her own family member. She made nineteen trips in all and was very proud of the fact that she never once lost a single person under her care. “I never ran my train off the tracks,” she once said, “and I never lost a passenger.” Southern whites put a $12,000 price on her head- a fortune. Southern blacks simply called her Moses. By the start of the Civil War, she has brought more people out of slavery than any other American in history- black or while, male or female.
Tubman’s reputation and influence commanded respect, and not just among slaves who dreamed of gaining their freedom. Influential northerners of both races sought her out. She spoke and rallies and in homes throughout Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Boston, Massachusetts; St. Catherines, Canada, and Auburn, New York, where she eventually settled. People of prominence sought her out, such as Senator William Seward, who later became Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State, and outspoken abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglas. Tubman’s advice and leadership were also requested by John Brown, the famed revolutionary abolitionist. Brown always referred to the former slave as “General Tubman” and was quoted as saying she “was a better officer than most whom he has seen, and could command an army as successfully as she had her small parties of fugitives.” That is the essence of the Law of Respect. Harriet Tubman would appear to be an unlikely candidate for leadership, because the deck was certainly stacked against her. But despite her circumstances, she became and incredible leader. The reason is simple: People naturally follow leaders stronger than themselves. Everyone who came in contact with her recognized her strong leadership ability and felt compelled to follow her. That’s how the Law of Respect works.
1. Why wasn’t Harriet Tubman an obvious choice as a leader?
2. How did Harriet Tubman gain respect?
3. How did respect factor into her leadership abilities?
4. Who is the person you respect the most at Kennesaw Mountain high? Why is this person so highly respected? What has this person been able to accomplish?
Option 2: George Lucas
Who can tell me who made the movie Star Wars? (Let them respond.) George Lucas also produced such blockbusters as the Indiana Jones trilogy. What you may not know is that as a high school student he didn't know himself. All he wanted to do was to race cars, never taking his studies seriously. But just before his graduation, while driving home from the library in his little Fiat, he prepared for a left turn by glancing in his rearview mirror. But as he started the turn, he heard the sound of another car, a blowing horn, and the impact of a speeding Chevy crunching into the driver side of his car. It should have killed him. The little Fiat turned four or five complete flips before it wrapped around a solid oak tree. The impact was so great that it actually moved the entire tree a couple of feet over, leaving a huge hole in its former position.
The accident put him in the hospital, where he began to ask the big questions: "Why am I here?" "What should I do with my life?" Still interested in racing, he decided to film the cars rather than race them. He found a creative side to himself that he hadn't known before. Without understanding himself, he wouldn't have become a producer and we would have never seen his movies.
But it wasn't enough for Lucas to know himself. He needed to understand how to work with others. I'll ask you the same question I asked you earlier, "Who made the movie Star Wars?" (Let them answer. Upon reflection, it took a lot more people than Lucas.)
Sure Lucas wrote the story and was the motivating force behind it. But there's no way he could have done it by himself. (Turn on one of his videos where the credit lines are starting to run. As it runs, ask the students to name the types of people it took to put this together (for example: caterers who are able to think ahead about amounts of food, type of food, and time schedules; creative people like artists and writers; technical people like programmers and cameramen, travel agencies to arrange transportation.)
Transition: Whether we're wanting to have a successful business, a successful sports career, a successful family, or successful dating relationship, we each need to 1) know ourselves and 2) know how to get along with others who are different.
Today we want to take a personality profile in order to know ourselves better. Then, we want to get with those of different personalities to see how we can better get along with them.
Step 3: (15 minutes) Hand out the Hartman test and read the following test directions.
A. Answer questions being honest to yourself. Mark the choice that comes to you most readily. Skip the more difficult and return to them later.
B. Choose answers that are most often typical of your thoughts and/or actions. Do not answer based upon what you wish were true.
C. To get a true reading you must be true to yourself.
D. You will have 10 minutes to complete this test.
Step 4: (5 minutes) Direct the students to score their responses. Point out the tally spaces at the end of the test section.
· Lead the students to tally the number of responses in each letter category – A’s, B’s, C’s, and D’s.
· Then have the students tally the grand total, which will identify their primary color.
· Explain that the letter with the highest total suggests their natural personality while the number of responses in other columns suggests the amount of personality blend.
Step 5: (5 minutes) Based upon students’ identified colors, handout lists of colors strengths, limitations, and interaction strategies to each student for their PRIMARY COLOR. Allow students time to individually review this information and respond informally.
Step 6: (10 minutes) Ask the students to get in groups according to their primary colors. Ask them to review the pros and cons of their color based on these questions.
· To what extent do the profiles verify what you already believed about yourself?
· What new insights do the profiles provide that you realize are true but had never openly acknowledged?
· In what ways might this profile prove helpful to you in the future?
Step 7: (Rest of class, leaving time for steps 8, 9) Then put the red and white groups together, the blue and yellow groups together. Have a spokesperson from each color explain to the other people about their characteristics. Then, they should discuss how the differences in the two "colors" can impact their ability to get along and work together. Finally, they are to put on a role-play, song, skit, or some interaction of their choice to demonstrate / explain how to communicate with someone of another color.
· The red and white will explain to the class how to build a relationship with the other.
· The blue and yellow will do the same
· Time permitting remix the groups.
Step 8: Have the students complete the “Self- Profile Chart.”
Step 9: Action Points: As we said in the beginning, much of our success in life is determined by our ability to both know ourselves and our skill at getting along with those different from ourselves. We saw it in the life of George Lucas. We see it in girl-guy relationships, where after many years of conflict, husbands and wives take a personality inventory and say, "Wow! If I'd only known our personality profiles 10 years ago, we could have avoided so much conflict and hurt!" We see it in successful businesses, where people like billionaire Bill Gates of MicroSoft says, ''Success still involves getting people to work together….'' (Bill Gates, ''Ask Bill,'' New York Times Syndicate, Jan. 14, 1997).
It's so easy for us, when relationships in our family or with teachers and students get rough, just to avoid those people and move to other relationships, rather than trying to work things through and learning to get along. Write down the initials of one or more people that you're having difficulty relating to. It could be family members, teachers or fellow students. This week, I challenge you to work on that skill of getting along with people who rub you wrong. Those of us who develop that skill now will save a lot of future heartache, and set ourselves up for future success.
Written by: Steve Miller (North Star Church) and Billy Richardson
Reviewed by Madeline Turner and Marquette Gilmer
Revised By Billy Richardson Fall 2006/ 2007