"Don't Underestimate Kids"


Couple of weeks ago I downloaded a TED Conference speech by 12-year-old Adora Svitak. (Yes! She's 12, and she spoke at TED). It was for an exercise at the Whampoa Family Service Centre in which the kids would have to:

- do a word search puzzle based on the vocab in the speech (thank you free puzzle websites)
- discuss the meaning of the words and form sentences using them
- watch the speech, listen, and hopefully follow along with the transcript
- do an exercise in which they built an argument for, or against, a topic.

As context - Adora Svitak, an American who got her first book published at 7, talked about What Adults Can Learn from Kids. I wanted the kids to be inspired by someone their own age. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/adora_svitak.html.

Some of the volunteers, myself included, were worried at first. These were 9-12 year olds - most with a not-so-great command of English. Would the kids get it? Would they be bored? Lost? Start running around?
As it turns out, there were challenging bits. But for the most part, both kids and volunteers learned from the exercise.

My friend Sunita realised that some of the kids needed simpler tasks. So she's offered to come up with exercises for the kids who're not as advanced for future sessions.

I got an insight into what some of the kids think. One of the 9-year-olds, whose mother doesn't speak any English, wrote "My aspiration is to be a lawyer" after we discussed the word "aspiration".

For "underestimate", 10-year old boy wrote "Adults suck because they always underestimate kids." Interestingly, her sister wrote this about him, "Don't underestimate my brother. He might be lazy, but he's very smart."

I also realised not all kids like this stuff (duh). So I asked one of the kids whose eyes had glazed over what she wanted to do. She said "I don't like reading. I want to do Science."

So THIS Saturday - MJ, a 20something volunteer from Novartis, will be prepping a session on kidneys and doing a Wheel of Fortune-like gameshow/ quiz.

And, along the lines of not underestimating kids, I came across this really interesting story in the NY Times today about how a couple of schools are stretching 8-year-olds by using kids' classics to teach philosophy. http://nyti.ms/9hGLbN