By Haley Enochs – Loveland, Colorado … In an English class assignment, Campion Academy students learned how to lift up and encourage their peers by walking in “each other’s shoes.”
American Literature teacher, Erin Johnson, assigned students the task of diving deeply into the theme from the book “To Kill a Mockingbird” by completing The Atticus Finch Walkathon. In the book, the character Atticus says to better understand a person, you need to “climb inside of his skin and walk around in it” (To Kill a Mockingbird, page 30).
“I feel like this project taught a really valuable lesson that is often ignored, and I wanted to make this quote really sink in with the students,” Johnson said.
Students interviewed each other, learning about unique situations in their lives. Afterwards, they spent thirty minutes walking around campus imagining what it would be like to be the individual. Finally, students wrote encouraging letters to their classmates.
“Overall, I think they enjoyed getting to know other people through the interviews, and in the end, there will be many people who will be encouraged through the letters,” Johnson explained.
A few students thought it was really fun and taught valuable lessons about how they don’t know what other people go through on a day-to-day basis.
“I feel like it went good; I felt energized afterward, and I had some new things to try that my interviewee told me about,” Jared Marcenaro, Campion Academy junior, explained.
“I was thinking about how awesome the person I interviewed was about handling their emotions,” Marcenaro concluded.
–Haley Enochs is a senior at Campion Academy; photos by Erin Johnson
