June 3, 2018

The Explanations Game

We started off by asking the students to remember the work we did the day before. Can each team stand up, go to the center of the room, present their work and explain it? We elaborated what details they can include. Who lives in their room? Why is their room designed the way it is?

From this exercise, we were immediately alerted to the student who liked storytelling.

Make your room in outer space

This part of the workshops initially belonged in Day 1- but, given how engaged they were with the current assignments that day- it would have been too much to drag it to completion. So, I pushed this exercise to the next day.

This project began with a small presentation that involved questions of what life would be like outside the earth, in outer space. I asked these questions:

Are their homes going to be like the ones we made yesterday?

How are they going to be different?

Is there oxygen out there?

Do they float?

Are there trees in Space? Perhaps something else?

What do they possibly eat?

Can you build your scale figure a new room, but for a room in Space?

The ‘room in space’ became more of a home, rather than a room. Many students sitting alongside each other had similar projects - which I wasn’t very pleased about but was used to seeing from teaching in 2013. Later I wondered - what’s so wrong with copying, imitating - in order to learn? Don’t we all do it?

Cylinders, circles and silver, transparent materials (which I provided for the class) were far more prevalent in these projects than the last ‘room’ on earth. Many affixed these to a flat surface - not something I expected - but later this too made sense to me, even if a new ground, there still was ground.

Class ended around half an hour early due to high glucose levels and lack of strong-willed instructors (myself). 

What I wish I could change

For the first day of the workshops - There was a lot of support - from the Building Hope coordinators to the current art class instructor who pitched in to help. However, on Sunday - The coordinator who was working that day- through no fault of her own - was busy setting the space and students up for a brand new English class. As I only landed in Sri Lanka so recently - I had not made time to discuss and arrange the involvement of more teachers on these workshops - a hard lesson that I quickly learned. What happened the rest of that day was (as I later found out) a classic case of a teacher being outnumbered.

As the number of students exceeded the number of seats that could fit into the class - so we decided - for that day, to move into the large lecture hall, which had been recently abandoned because of leaks in the roof. It wasn’t raining at that time, so it was fit for our use.

To my surprise - I learned that a spacious hall isn’t exactly the best idea for a bunch of mostly 7-10 year olds. Soon after the snack break - perhaps they got too much energy from the food - they started running around, smashing each other’s projects and playing tag- I was helpless in a crowd of 30 kids.

Given the state of the class that day, we did not progress to the next assignment I had planned for day 2. In a way, it was a good thing, as then I would then have more time to re-work the program to fit the age of these students!

We ended the session early that day- and used the extra 45 minutes to play outside - even that resulted in several arguments, and a lot of name calling both in Tamil and Sinhalese. I thought to myself: I’m in for a whole new ball-game!

Although I was disappointed with Sundays proceedings overall - I took some time to consider what good things came out of the class that day. For the first half of the class at least, I was able to garner their attention, and during that short time they did some nice work.