Malcolm Griffiths obituary

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/dec/02/malcolm-griffiths-obituary

This article is about the life of Malcolm Griffiths, who was an extreme theater person.  He wrote and directed many plays and it talks about his life.

One thing that it talks about is how he had a personal crusade to "build his own bridges between east and west." Like this, as a teacher, I hope to build my own bridges all over the world, whether that be starting out with just Florida or some state that isn't ours, and going all the way over to India or China.  It is very important to build bridges in education, because it can lead to things like what he did with one of his classes at Nottingham.  He invited Stephen Lowe to come into his classroom and share his latest play, which he had just started on, with a dozen students where each of them would have to make their own set and costumes.

I will be that teacher who builds bridges between two different subjects that seem to be completely different, and who builds bridges between continents, and who builds bridges of positive relationships for students.  That is a key thing to do in Special Education, to build bridges of positive relationship for students, because many students with EBD don't have very good role models or positive relationships.  And I will set out to help them find those positive relationships and build them in a positive and healthy way and then help maintain them.

So how will I do this?  I will do this by possibly being the first role model and/or friend (Now, the argument that this brings up needs to be covered in another post, the argument of whether a teacher should be a friend or not to their students) to these students.  And once they trust me enough, I will introduce them to someone who I feel would be a good influence and a good friend to them.  I will teach them different rules that I takes to be in a friendship, such as no hitting.  I will do this by playing a board game with them and make sure that there are no rules and that the game begins to be really confusing.  For instance, Twister where you can push a person off if you so choose (we would play it on a soft floor probably in the gym) and that would take up all of the first class period, but at the end of the class period, I introduce what rule of socialization we will be talking about this week.  For instance, with Twister, the rule would be "No hitting or bullying."  So, the next day, we talk about the rules surrounding this rule.  What I would do is break down this rule into a few other rules, possibly 3 (one for Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday), and talk about each of them on one of the days.  So, the three for "No bullying" would be "Rule 1: Don't hitting," "Rule 2: Don't say mean things to people," and "Rule 3: Build people up by saying complementing them."  On Tuesday, I would talk about Rule 1, on Wednesday, I would talk about Rule 2, and on Thursday, I would talk about Rule 3.  Now, on Friday, we would have an review of what we just talked about the entire week.  And then we play the game Twister again, this time with the rules reinstated.