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| What makes a good juggler? Practice. |
When you let go, amazing things happen.
Last Saturday at Whampoa, a 10-year-old who had never spoken up or answered questions in class got up and not only led her group in a presentation – she did an entire demo. Brief, to the point, and effective, Anna (all kids' names have been changed) and her three team-mates told us to stand on one foot, and then close our eyes and continue to stand on one foot. Then she explained why it’s a more difficult to balance when you close your eyes.
Then another group got up and read an entire story they’d written - out loud, in unison. It was about an alien with 24 arms and 5 legs discovering juggling and then practicing really hard to win an intergalactic talent competition. It had a well-organised, credible plot. Well-illustrated too.
At first I thought the 10-year-old, in the group Andy, had written the story and the rest had just drawn and coloured. It turns out that it was Shah, one of the 8-year-olds, who came up with most of the plot - and Andy was mainly the scribe.
We wouldn’t have discovered what the kids were capable of if we hadn’t let go of the agenda and improvised a little.
At the beginning of the session, we had a guest: the amazing Mickael Bellemene, contact juggler. Link here He gave the kids a preview of his gravity defying act and talked about how much he loved his craft even as a kid (didn’t like school), how much he practiced (the whole day for days on end, at one time - until he got injured) and how important it was to do things well.
Then we asked the kids to get in groups of four, come up with questions of their own, research the answers, and present - to everyone.
As with the past two sessions, we modelled the hour after Sugata Mitra's Self Organised Learning Framework in which four kids choose their own teams, share one PC, research and discuss answers, and present. The adults stayed away unless asked to help. In our case, we discovered that when we did that, the kids tended to copy and paste facts off the web, and then present stuff they didn't really understand.
We've been working on how to get over this - and the solution turned out really differently between the two groups of kids. The volunteers on Anna’s team first helped the girls come up with a narrow enough question. From my end of the room I heard words like fulcrum, flexible, balance from Anna’s group. First-time volunteer, Beverly, engaged the normally shy Anna like no one had been able to before. She and another volunteer, Hui, helped the kids come up with progressively more biteable chunks of information they could work on.
On the other end of the room, Andy's group wanted to find out how aliens juggle. They went online, found some "Roswell" / alien-sighting sites, but in the end, no one could agree if the web could tell them definitively whether aliens exist. Hence the tale of Intergalactic Creatures Have Talent. Worked out fine, in my view.
If they two things the team took away were:
- Google doesn't know EVERYTHING - really!
- and "hey, I can write and tell a pretty darn good story!"
then we'd done some really nice work that day - both the adults and the kids.
My lesson for the day: relax, look, listen, learn. Be amazed.
