The Leaning Tower of Pajilla (straw)

The past two weeks my students learned about teamwork and leadership, and this week they had to put their new skills to the test. I challenged them to build the tallest and most stable tower using only straws and pins. It had to be able to stand on its own, and I was going to huff and puff to see if I could blow the house down.



There are some budding engineers (and leaders) among my students, but many of the unrealistic but ambitious towers fell spectacularly. A challenge universal to seventh graders entering adolescence was working together with people of the other gender (cooties!), and the groups that could not muster the maturity to include all of their teammates did not win.





After completing the activity, the students and I analyzed the ingredients of a successful team (clear communication, a defined plan, achievable goals, spirit of cooperation, respect for your classmates). I asked them when in real-life we have to use teamwork. And finally, I said that by knowing the ingredients of a successful team, they can identify what is missing in their future group experiences and proactively work to add the missing elements.




In another school we continued discussing self-esteem with a focus on gender. In groups of boys and girls, they identified 10 reasons they are content with their gender. Then they had to wear the other gender’s shoes (or heeled sandals, in the case of Guatemalan women) and answer the question, “if I were a man/woman…”

The comparisons between what each gender identified as their strengths and how the other group imagined themselves as man/woman was interesting. There was consensus about the roles of women, with both girls and boys identifying a woman’s strengths as being a mother, cooking, ironing, and being caring and responsible.


However, what the boys identified as their strengths, and how the girls imagined themselves as men was very different. The boys were content to be men for very physical reasons: they are stronger, they work, they are taller, and they can urinate more easily (of course, there had to be a phallic mention). But when the girls answered the question “if I were a boy,” their answers were all emotional: they would be compassionate, sympathetic, kind, caring, and they would care for their children. In sum, the boys saw themselves as physically macho, and the girls wanted men with emotions.

The teachers and I asked the students why there was this contradiction of a culture in which men cannot access their emotional side even when their women want them to be emotional. For all that the girls said that they did not recognize “machismo” and that they wanted an emotional man, the teachers noted that those kind of men are seen as weak push-overs and that they have trouble finding women. The teachers and I argued that it is a disservice to the development of boys that they are not allowed to access their emotions as openly as women, and we talked about where this comes from and how to change it. Gender is a tricky subject here, partly because the roles are so strictly defined and not at all interchangeable (a man will never wash a dish in Guatemala, and a buffet restaurant is unthinkable because no man would bring his own food to the table). This week is was a first conversation, and we’ll see where it continues next week.