Teaching Friendship
One of my favorite essays to teach every year is Frans de Waal’s “Monkey See, Monkey Do, Monkey Connect.”
De Waal is—among many titles and accomplishments—the director of the Living Links Center at the National Primate Research Center at Emory. The focus of the ENPRC is to conduct research “to advance scientific understanding and to improve human and animal health worldwide.”
In “Monkey See,” de Wall connects primate behavior to human behavior by showing how primates—and other animals—experience and exhibit the same feelings and traits. It’s easy to connect the dots for humans. Give a big yawn at the front of the room and count how many students follow suit. Ask students if they’ve ever gotten up from lunch before they were done eating, just because their friends were ready to move on—that behavior is part of herd instinct.
De Wall also discusses the concept of embodied cognition—the way we involuntarily move our bodies to mirror those around us. Again, it’s easy to connect to students: the way two or three people taking a nap on a school bus can lead to 40 sleeping teenagers who weren’t tired when they got on the bus. Or how two or three wired students can send a whole classroom into energetic chaos.
This is a great essay for practicing summarization skills, identifying fact and opinion, delineating arguments, or just getting students to think about the way they interact in the world. If you’d like to use it in the classroom, I’ve listed some general discussion/pre-writing/pre-thinking questions below, as well as some YouTube videos that touch on the same subjects.
Discussion/Pre-Writing/Pre-Thinking Questions:
How many distinct groups of people do you belong to? For example: family, sports teams, peer groups, etc.
What behavior do you see your peers doing that you find the most obnoxious?
What behavior do your peers exhibit that you find it hard to resist participating in?
How do you make friends?
What makes you feel lonely?
Video Connections
Social Groups: Crash Course Sociology #16 | YouTube | Crash Course | 9:51
”How do the groups that you’re part of affect you? How do you, in turn affect these groups? Today we are talking about how people in society come together with a look at social groups. We’ll look at what social groups are, the different kinds of groups that exist, group dynamics, leadership, conformity, networks and more!”
How I Made Friends | YouTube | VlogBrothers | 3:59
”In which John talks about the challenges of making friends in adulthood, and how he made his first friends after moving to Indianapolis eleven years ago.”
Frientimacy: The 3 Requirements of All Healthy Friendships | Shasta Nelson | TEDxLaSierraUniversity | YouTube | 16:23