There is a post today on Ask A Manager on bad ice breakers. In general, I don’t like them (though I don’t have to do them) because at best, they’re bland and boring. At worst, they’re othering and fraught. I mean, “What’s your favorite movie?” is boring for the most part, but for me, it’s fraught because I don’t watch movies any longer. The last movie I watched, I really thought I’d like it–but I hated it. The last movie I watched that I truly liked was Guardians of the Galaxy. Bookwise, I mostly don’t read popular novels because I–well, this is a requirement I have of most of the media I consume. There have to be minorities in it, and not just as tokens. This cuts out a large swath of media. It’s amazing how I can watch a trailer for something and dimiss it in the first ten seconds because it’s, as I’m fond of phrasing it, ‘white people doing white people things’.
It’s one reason I watch cozy competition shows–there are plenty of minorities in the ones I watch. It’s harder to have judges and MCs who are PoC, but there are those as well. It’s one reason I really liked the first season of Next in Fashion (let’s not talk about the second season) because almost everyone on the show was a minority in one way or the other; several were double or triple minorities. I have no interest in fashion, but I have a lot of interest in diversity.
Back to icebreakers.
In the thread, someone mentioned that they had a coworker who was in a coma for two months after she was hit by a car. The teacher in the class asked for an interesting fact about each person, and the coworker, ‘Sandra’, mentioned what happened to her. The instructor was fascinated and asked follow-up questions.
The commenter who posted this story said they asked Sandra if she made the comment on purpose, which Sandra did not seem to undrestand. The commenter suggested not bringing it up agian so as to ‘not freak out the teacher’. They went on to suggest using ‘fun fact’ rather than ‘interesting fact’ to avoid a situation like this, but I was truly puzzled.