Black Ant Incident Analysis

My initial thought on the black ant incident, is that I do not believe I would have thought to handle it in the manner that Mary Cowhey did. Over the course of the day, if I see an ant crawling around my bedroom or kitchen surfaces, my most immediate reaction is always just to squash it. In this way, I would react to this situation in a similar manner to how most of the students in the classroom do. Killing an ant just seems to be an acceptable behavior in society to me. Much like how Cowhey’s student Ben states: “but we always kill ants...we can kill ants if we want to” (Cowhey 2) To treat ants and other insects in this manner, is the social norm for most people. And because of that, many teachers may overlook an incident such as this. They …show more content…
The first most obvious one to me, is the ethics of killing another living organism. Cowhey searches out scholars and members from differing religious groups to get an opinion on this issue. This is a good demonstration on the idea that different cultures can hold differing sets of values and ethics. For instances, she mentions the family of vegetarians who visit her home on Thanksgiving. While eating meat, especially on that holiday, is a part of our culture and seen as the norm, in other parts of the worlds where people may practice a religion like Hinduism, every life is valued the same and thus many individuals follow a vegetarian diet. Learning to accept and understand the differences that are present in the people in our world, is something important that students should take away from their instruction in social studies. While many of us do not think twice about killing ants, in our parts of the world it is frowned upon because ants are living beings that share the world with …show more content…
When schools have food drives, people usually just drop off cans and other goods without much thought to where they are going. They are not worried about the less fortunate struggling families, instead they think about winning a pizza party for their class. In this way, these drives do not do much good to solve the underlying problems in society that revolve around hunger. While it is good to donate food to these types of drives, it is important to understand where the food is going, and who the people are that will be receiving it. “When kids collect canned goods for ‘poor people,’ it makes ‘poor people’ seem like a predestined, anonymous group. It makes poverty seem like a permanent, almost genetic condition” (Cowhey 26). The phrase Cowhey uses to refer to these types of drives is ‘token gestures of generosity’. They are referred to as such because the children just blindly give, and learn little about the people and places they give