This clever teacher used apples to teach kids about bullying, and now her lesson is going viral

Rosie Dutton, a relaxation and mindfulness instructor in the UK, just taught a very important lesson to a room full of children — and now it’s going viral on Facebook. Dutton brought two apples into the classroom, and the apples looked identical on the outside. They were both red, round, and nearly perfect-looking; however, one of them had a secret.

“[T]he children didn’t know this, but before the class I had repeatedly dropped one of the apples on the floor, you couldn’t tell, both apples looked perfect,” she wrote in her Facebook post. “We talked about the apples and the children described how both apples looked the same; both were red, were of similar size and looked juicy enough to eat.”

Then, Dutton took the apple she’d dropped and said mean things to it, in front of the entire classroom. She insulted its appearance, its intelligence, and asked students to do the same as she passed it around the room. You can imagine what happened next — she took the apple that she hadn’t dropped, and said nice things to it, and had the students follow suit.

After the round of insults and compliments, she cut the apples open, and the children surveyed the insides of the apples. The apple that had received compliments looked perfect and delicious, while the apple that had been insulted looked bruised and nearly inedible.

“They really got it, what we saw inside that apple, the bruises, the mush and the broken bits is what is happening inside every one of us when someone mistreats us with their words or actions,” Dutton wrote.

This was a really clever way to teach the kids about bullying — we often can’t see the damage we do to each other on the outside, but when you look inside, there it is. It really got the kids in the classroom thinking, and maybe other teachers will start to use this lesson, too.

You can see her whole Facebook post here, which at this point has 172k reactions and 202k shares.

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