While doing a good deed for others come naturally for most persons, students in the ?Social Problems? class at North Central Missouri College used their instinct as a class project.
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While doing a good deed for others come naturally for most persons, students in the ?Social Problems? class at North Central Missouri College used their instinct as a class project.
Based on the movie, ?Pay it Forward,? each student did one good deed for three persons, then asked them to do the same for three other persons. The good deeds were tracked by the students, who then documented them and discussed the relevance in their lives.
Heather Rich suggested the idea after seeing the movie over Christmas break.
?I thought it would be a good idea to do as a class project,? she said. ?It required us to get out of our ?comfort zone? and do some things that we might not normally do otherwise.?
Heather?s project began with her mother, sister and best friend. In the case of her mother, Heather returned a check that she had given to her as a payback for a past debt. For her sister, Heather babysat her nieces and nephews so that her sister could go out with her friends for the evening. But her friend, Jennifer, was a different story.
?Jennifer is one of those people who doesn?t like to ask people for things, even though she might need some help,? Heather said. ?So I talked to another friend of ours who said she needed some help and I went out to buy her some groceries because my other friend said Jennifer wasn?t buying food.?
As the result of those good deeds, people from her mother?s church were able to go to a basketball game because her mother provided transportation, while her mother also made pies for a bake sale and volunteered to clean a church. Heather?s sister planned a party for a friend and provided hair care for some girls who attend the Boys and Girls Club, but who couldn?t afford to have it done. She also provided a pregnant friend with a day at the spa.
Heather?s friend, Jennifer, did volunteer work for Special Olympics and took her little sister shopping for her first prom. But perhaps the biggest accomplishment was Jennifer facing her fear of needles and giving blood at the local bloodmobile.
?That was a big step for her,? Heather said.
Other students also told of good deeds they had done as part of the project, with many involving family members. However, several also did things for strangers, which drew some interesting reactions.
One student said she found it easier to do projects for people she didn?t know because ?strangers don?t expect it, but your family does.? Another student said not knowing someone made it easier while a third found it harder to do deeds from a stranger than for their own family member.
?Our purpose was to find out whether or not one person can make a difference,? instructor Linda Franklin said. ?We talked about what the problems (we encountered) were and what we can do to fix them. Those students who saw the project through to the end got a lot out of it.?
Kaleb Leeper, who began the project as one of the more skeptical students, came away with a different perspective.
?I thought it would be kind of a silly thing to do,? Leeper said. ?But after it was done, I thought it was a good project and taught me a lot. We wanted to see if one person can make a difference and in a smaller community, like Trenton, it does.?