Teen Presentation

A room full of 9-12 graders, a cut open garbage bag, 15 bottles of condiments, a computer and a script wer used to fill a good portion of my afternoon yesterday.  I had to give a presentation in the high school to 20 students on teen dating violence.  The powerpoint presentation itself was good, I had a couple great utube videos to support it.  The kids were engaged and participated in the discussion throughout and only one was sleeping.  I thought that was successful!  

I had taken an idea from my mother's 7th grade religious ed. class (Thanks Mom!)  from years ago and revamped it to fit to domestic violence.  I wrote a script involving two dating teenagers, a narrator and a voice.  The 4 kids read the script and as the male's words or actions represent a negative behavior, or the female would behave in a certain way, the voice would say a word.  Each student had a bottle with a word on it, such as "threatening", "verbal abuse" or "intimidation", and when their word was called they walked over to the garbage bag and squirted the bottle on it.  As the story went on, the negative behaviors intensified, and the 15 bottles were all squirted on the bag.  After the story ended I asked the kids what the purpose of the excercise was and one of the 3 boys in the class spoke up and explained that it represented how behaviors keep building up, adding up and pretty soon your life is a mess. 

We talked about how no relationship is perfect, but that the key is to be aware of the behaviors and if you see them happening to talk about them and prevent them from snowballing.  The kids were really engaged in the discussion and loved the excercise, so overall, it was a success. 

Afterwards I handed out a survey and I was blown away by their responses.  Over 50% had seen or experienced physical abuse in teen dating relationships and around 25% had experienced or saw sexual abuse.  The students listed things such as meth, drugs and alcohol in general as being a contributing factor.  This is just a bit of what I found, but it's scary.  I have my work cut out for me I guess.