Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions

One example of a microaggression that I detected this week was at school between students in another grade. As I was walking down the hallway, I overheard a group of students talking with their teacher about an incident that occurred in gym class. The part of the incident that I heard was about the boys in the class making fun of a girl and calling her names due to her gender and weight. They were telling the girl that they did not want her on their team and that because of being a girl and overweight she was too slow and would cause their team to lose. The way I felt was indescribable. I wanted to believe this was not true.  I really did not believe we had students in our school of leadership who would do such a thing. I was glad there were adults who were intervening right away.  I then thought what our school could do to end violence / microaggression in hopes of our students growing up and wanting to continue to teach other young children the right way to act.

The observation experiences really put into perspective what microaggressions are.  Reading the specific experiences, made me think of how often and true they are. People do not even realize they are doing something to harm another person until it is too late. This week I really understood the importance of thinking hard before you speak or act. We need to be more aware of who we are as a person and what we are doing to be positive role models for others.