“All dreams spin out from the same web.”
Author Unknown
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This line travels almost everywhere under Mother Teresa's name, and it appears in none of her published writing. No earlier speaker has been traced either, so it arrives with no owner: a sentence a great many people have found true without ever knowing who said it first.
The conversation plan
Take this into a classroom.
Judging and loving are made to compete here for the same scarce thing: your attention. Spend it deciding who someone is and there is none left over for finding out. The trouble arrives fast, because some of the most loving things anyone does are judgments, and a parent who never corrects is not loving harder. What the line will not settle is where the boundary sits between judging what a person did and judging who a person is.
Claim
Judging someone closes them off, and you cannot love a person you have stopped being curious about.
Counterclaim
Boundaries are a form of love, and the people who correct you are usually the ones paying attention.
Essential question
Can you judge someone and love them at the same time?
The rest of the plan
Prompts, handout, teacher guide.
4 storytelling prompts go with this conversation, along with the printable student handout and teacher guide. Those are part of the Teach Different community, together with the full library of plans and the monthly live trainings where teachers work through them.