When I began teaching AP Psychology, my mentor Steve Phelps gave me an activity for the Social Psych unit that played with the concept of deindividuation. Generally that’s the loss of self-awareness when in a group; in the worst case scenario it accounts for abberant behaviors when one feels anonymous. The class activity gave each student a slip of paper for them to answer anonymously on, with the prompt: “If you could do anything humanly possible and no one would ever find out that it was you, what would you do?”
After they’d put something down on the slip of paper, I walked around with a bowl, collected them, mixed them up, and then drew each from the bowl, reading it aloud. Answers “ranged” from “Rob a bank” all the way to “Steal millions of dollars.”
In the second year of doing the activity, right in the middle of the littany of sins came, “Cure cancer.” The class erupted, yelling at whoever had written that, saying they’d wasted a perfectly good opportunity. After I calmed the class, I asked who’d written it and why. One kid[1] said, “Cancer will get cured by someone, and it’s not important who does it, just as long as it happens.”
I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was some incredible wisdom — that I’ve now taken to heart. In my own world, there are jobs that need to be done for a school to operate, and it’s not important who does them, just so long as they get done.
I try to incorporate that into a sense of service; I do odd jobs around school that nobody needs to know are me. That I’m doing them isn’t important; what’s important is that they just get done.
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I’m embarrassed now to admit, 15 years later, that I don’t remember who it was; I don’t even remember if it was a boy or a girl. I think I was such a raw, young teacher, I was in that daze of not really knowing what was going on in my own class or how I should respond. ↩