Affinity Groups

Once a month, we are spending a precious forty-five minutes in Affinity Groups. To what end? Well, here is what teachers want students’ experience with Affinity Groups to be: they want us to learn about and discuss race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status in a safe and joyous environment. The question is, what are the students’ actual experiences? To answer this, I made a survey and had it put in The Daily, hoping to better understand what my peers thought.

When asked what could be improved, some said “I think that we should have affinity groups more often because I find that once per month is a bit too few.” Others, however, said “I feel like it's very strict and ‘here's the lesson plan, let's learn’ when it would actually be more fun and more bonding would happen if we actually had a conversation without dialogue.” With the same prompt, some said that they wanted to have more meetings at the same time that others felt that these groups are too strict and structured. This shows the difference in opinions about Affinity Groups, something that the adults at our school designed to benefit everyone.

However, there were also aspects of this that students appreciated, such as them liking their high school leaders, to name one. A returning student said that Affinity Groups are less boring than previous years, and another mentioned, yet again, that their high schoolers are funny, making the whole experience better.

In this place that we spend a lot of our time in, your peers have many different opinions on Affinity Groups, something that plays a fairly large role in our school. It can be useful, or not, it can be fun, or not, it really depends on each individual opinion in our diverse, wonderful, and complex community.

What do you think?