The second and third lesson

The second lesson started with a mindmap about "old people". We gave some pieces of papers to the students on which they should write at leat 3-4 associations they had about this topic. Everybody should present his sheets infront of the group and arrange them in a logical way on the board by finding headlines or topics like "diseases", "physical appearence", "spare time" etc.
At the end the black board was full of diffrent thoughts and associations about old people. Apparently things like grey hairs, no teeth, creases and slowly movements. Funny things like "old people wear always wear wollen clothes" or "they always have candies at home". But also different opinions about the stereotype of an old person came up: Some of the pupils thought that the mayority of old people would be funny, friendly, interesting and smart because of their life experiences and stories. Others had the opinion that most of them are angry, always in a bad mood, lazy and that they hate the youth. Of course we hope to change these negative attitude through our project and to sensibilze the students for the reasons of these clichés (that this generation grew up in different times, that compared to young people they are at the end of their life and they experience how they are getting weaker)
About one thing we were also surprised. Some boys told us, that most of the old people have problems with alcohol. First we wondered why they had this impression, as most alcoholics don't become very old. But then we realized that it might be because the average drunk people in the street are around fifty, and age that is considered as "old" by the students.
We hope that we can show another side from old people. So that they couuld say at the end: There are a few old people with alcohol problems but there are a lot without.
After this conversation we seperated them in groups of 4 their task was to prepare a poster listing up the differences between being young and being old. They could be inspired by their thoughts on the mind map at the board. They should not only do a comparasion, but also make up their mind about why these differences exist and which consequences they have for the relationship between the different age groups.
In the second part of the lesson the pupils got a little bit more time to work on their posters and to prepare the presentation. We sat in a circle and every group presented the posters. Many of them listed up things like "Old people are often in a bad mood - Young people are often in a good mood", "Old people have problems with technics - Young people haven't problems with thechnics". In this case we wanted the students to go deeper and asked questions like "Why do you think old people are more often in a bad mood than youths?" or "Why do they have problems with technics?"The pupil figured out that it might be hard to know that they don't have a real future anymore and your physical and mental state gets worse. Very often they also listed up"slowliness" in comparasion to "fast". We made them clear that at a high age you can't adapt every innovation and trend anymore. Also old people have lived their whole life without technical support of computers, they are used to live without it. Some don't see a reason why they should start to use it now at the end of their lives, some are overextended.
We discussed about the retirement pays old people receive and whether they think it's fair to give them money for "doing nothing". But almost everybody had the opinion that we have a good system, because the old people had also worked for a long time and payed taxes back in time.
All in all it was a really successfull lesson, becuase the students started to reflect about the "stereotypes" of old people. They realized that many of these stereotypes have a reason, somea are natural and they all depend from person to person.