Chilling Lessons - from Kids

Interactive Museum Exhibit. Like our classes: organised chaos

Things were going pretty well this morning. Ok - who am I kidding. The kids weren't settling down, they were running around, chattering, banging on the keys on the classroom piano. One boy in particular, let's call him Miko, was refusing to join the group when the other kids finally were starting to quiet down and the control freak in me was going slightly nuts. 

Miko ran to the bookshelf and started pulling on magazines and ... a rag.

Were we regressing? I wondered. Things seemed so much more peaceful when we had the 9-12 year olds only and we had our "one conversation at a time" rule. It had taken a long while, but we'd gotten to the point in which we didn't even need to raise our voices to get the kids' attention - just raise our hand to indicate we were about to talk.

Now we've got everyone from 6 up, proportionally fewer volunteers, and for a few long minutes, it felt like bedlam.

Better than Weekend Brunch

A core group of us have been going to the Whampoa Family Service Centre for more than two years now. Our goal - to help the kids communicate in English, build confidence, make learning fun.

The first six months were pretty confusing and scary. The kids didn't know us, we weren't sure what to expect, and none of us knew anything about working with kids or what a lesson plan even was.

It took us months to build trust. Then the kids started responding. Then they started noticing when we were travelling and when we skipped weekends. The first time a kid said to me "Why you so long never come here?" I felt a mixture of guilt and gratification - wow they remember me!

Two really cool things happened last weekend. One of the girls made us a heart shaped thank-you card for teachers day and gave it to us before class started. A totally terrific surprise.

And, halfway into the session I asked a brand new volunteer how he was doing and he said, "It's great. I'm learning to help the kids learn how to learn."

And that, I guess, is what we've been doing many many Saturdays in a row.

And it's worth it.

Which Comes First: Fun or Structure?

We're two weeks into a new reading program at the Whampoa Family Service Centre and I'm psyched.

It's a 20-week program that's funded - ie. we have REAL books for kids of different reading ability, we have sample lesson plans, worksheets, and a trained educator to help us and show us the ropes. Oh, and I think we'll be gettin' learning games at some point. You cannot believe how great that feels.

We're learning some really valuable skills from Georgina, our allied educator - who's open enough to tell us she hasn't worked with kids like ours before and that she's learning along with us. She's a gem.

Are the kids still doing wheelies on chairs? Yes.
Are they still disrepectful? Yes, some, but a lot less than a year ago and it's nothing that worries me.
Is it still difficult to get them to sit still? Yes - but they're kids. Anyone of you who hasn't been IMing or doing email while on conference calls may throw the first stone.

Snow in Spring

Went to Juizaigou near Chengdu last month, Easter Weekend.

It was snowing when I arrived, not what I'd bargained for. Fortunately, six years in Chicago and NY had taught me the value of layering. Still, I'd been hoping for warmer weather, non-slippery tracks on the mountains, and really nice colours for photography.

So, as I'm climbing down Huanglong (took the cable car up...I'm not THAT tough), I'm thinking - maybe I shoulda come later in the year, like the OTHER tourists. Fewer puddles on the ground, more water in the springs, fewer layers needed...then, I finally got to the "Five Colour Pond"  - and wow. Surrounded by snow, the crystal blue water was in what looked like a series of nature's own infinity pools. I could hear crackles as snow melted and water trickled down the descending lakes. That one moment was worth the trip and worth the trek.

I'd been feeling kinda down about the learning program that my friends and I were working on at Whampoa. Attendance is inconsistent: 18 kids one week, and then 8 for the next few is frustrating. I want to impact more kids, not just a few! And we've got some really great, passionate volunteers who work hard to make learning fun - and they REALLY care about the kids. Engineers, graphic designers and marketing execs have little enough leisure time as it is...wouldn't more kids mean better ROI? I was mentally calculating their billable rates and dividing it by the number of kids in class.

Yes, the kids' behaviour had improved tremendously over the past three years, but was there any way of empirically measuring impact?

Ground Rules Part 1

 At the beginning of the year, we started discussing values with the kids. Got a great curriculum with lesson plans and worksheets called Values: for Lifelong Learners.

It's NOTHING preachy at all. The first exercise revolved around what we value in our friends - there was a list of about 21 words (great for vocab exercise) and then the kids had to vote on their top 5 and say why.

What came next surprised me. Their top 5 were:

1. Kind and caring

2. Honest (tied with the two below)

2. Integrity

2. Hardworking

5. Tough/ strong.

Qualities like curious, articulate, talented were low on the totem pole. Energetic and ambitious were somewhere in the middle. But what gave me pause was...if Kindness and Caring are on top, then how did tough/ strong, which seemed to me like polar opposites of caring - make it so far up the list?

Food For Thought on Vacation

Went to Lombok for a short vacation in the last few days of December. Lombok positions itself as Bali before Bali became commercialised. And it was only in the past decade that tourists have started going there in earnest - thanks to pack backers who led the way.

And to be sure, there isn't that rampant commercialism and development that's descended on Bali. Agriculture is still the main source of income - tourism is only #5. So there aren't the same conveniences, ease of communication and efficiencies that you find in Bali. And it's those little diamond-in-the-rough edges that give Lombok its personality. And keeps mass tourism away.

That's probably the reason villages like Sasak are still around. The Sasaks were the main tribe in Lombok - and now they occupy a series of villages where houses have thatched roofs, mud and dried dung floors, and, according to our guide, is still pretty communal. The money we spent on handmade fabric is to be shared between the villagers, and the money we gave our guide would go to him and ten other that he was training to be guides.

Our village guide spoke really good English - better than most of the staff at our hotel. He learned it from books: five words a day, when he was young he said. He has no e-mail, no smartphone, and is contactable only by SMS. The tribe has no website, even though it gets income from tourist visits (20 a day, mostly from Jakarta). Most of the villagers speak Sasak, not Behasa Indonesia. Kids go to school, but the community inter-marries and no one's left the village yet, he says. Medical care comes in the form of herbal and spiritual healing. It's a close knit community and everything is shared - from income, to home-building, to food.

Of course, education will bring modernity to the young in the village and bring them opportunity. But, in our globally connected world, seeing what others have that we don't also increases our wants, our needs, our goals. It would take a really special education system and community involvement to preserve that closeness and keep the balance between opportunity, community, and our very natural desire to have more, do more, see more.

link to Lombok images here: http://bit.ly/uFCC9j

We are Not Smarter than the Kids We Work With

Every Saturday, the Whampoa Learning volunteers work with kids that usually don't have the best grades in class - far from it. At age 9, many of them can't spell simple words, don't know how letters sound phonetically, and many of them believe they aren't really smart at all.

And it's easy for us adults, no matter how well meaning, to fall into the trap of our own preconceptions.

Last weekend, we were working with 9-year-old D. He looks like he's 7 and he seems to have a max attention span of 10 minutes - or rather, the longest we've been able to hold his attention is 10 minutes. Mark, a volunteer who is an engineer, had alternated b/t reading to / with him, playing a vowel "hotdog" game in the iPad, chasing him around the room to get back to "work".

Then D saw me playing Memory Matrix with another kid, and wanted to play too. It's one of those games where squares flash on the screen, disappear, then you click on where the square were. We saw him getting up to 8 squares, and then 9, and then 12. When he'd gotten the hang of it - he was using two hands. Fingers bouncing on the screen as if he were playing the piano.  

NONE of the other volunteers - engineers, execs - could get close to his score.

So there - D's got an incredible memory. And btw - he also does mental math faster than any of us. But because he can't read, anything above Primary 2 math is a lost cause for him since most everything requires reading and reasoning.

Now - what do we do w/ that information? Where can we get expert guidance on how we can help D learn? Any ideas anyone?