Our office partnered up with a non-profit organization and asked for volunteers to teach kids at Queenstown Primary School some lessons that focus on three key content areas: work readiness, entrepreneurship, and financial literacy. My seatmate Tinay and I signed up.
Our assignment was to teach a module called “Our City” which was split up into five one-hour sessions covered in three days. There were twelve volunteers from our office, and half of us had already done this before, so they were partnered up with the newbies. My partner was JP.
Though I’ve done charity work before, this is my first time to teach. And though I do well in public speaking, I’m not really a huge fan of children, so I was quite nervous about this and didn’t know what to expect. Halfway through reviewing my teaching material, I started to wonder if this was a good idea as I felt the erratic beating of my heart.
Our call time for day 1 (Feb 6) was 8:00 AM so I set my alarm to 5:30 AM so I would have ample time to get ready. I am no longer used to getting up this early, so I got nervous about missing my alarm that I kept waking up during the night, which was exactly what I didn’t need on top of the trepidation I already felt. Still, I managed to keep it together in class. Whew.
JP and I were assigned to 5-Honesty, a class of 34 boys and girls. When we walked into the room, they all stood up. Their teacher then greeted us and asked our names then introduced us to the class, whereupon they greeted us in a unison sing-song voice, “Good morning Mister JB and Miss Ivy.”
Okay, so maybe it was our fault for not saying our names clearly enough.
JP took the floor first and presented session 1 while I helped out in distributing materials and answering questions from kids who didn’t quite understand the instructions.
Most of the kids were quite shy, but there were a handful who were, as our other colleagues would put it later, “sunshine.” These were the kids who were not afraid to speak up and always volunteered to help and always smiled and engaged you in conversation (something I wasn’t during my student years).
One of these kids actually asked me, “Miss Heidee,” (he got my name right, the precious dear!) “Do you have Facebook? Can I friend you?”
They had actually warned us this would happen, so I had to give him the appointed answer, “Sorry, but we’re not allowed to communicate with you outside the classroom.”
A dejected frown. “Why not?” Aww, poor kid.
At that moment I felt like I was an evil evil person for breaking this poor boy’s heart, which makes me realize that I will probably make a terrible mother, the kind who succumbs to her child’s every request.
JP finally wrapped up session 1, so I stood up, rubbed my sweaty palms on the folds of my dress and took the microphone, saying, “Okay, it’s my turn now.”
To my surprise, my sunshine boys cheered “Yey!” and everyone started clapping.
Wow, one could get used to this.
I thanked them and went through my presentations without a hitch. I knew I did well because of what JP told me at the end of class: “You were so prepared.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that actually I wasn’t, I had only crammed for my presentation partly over breakfast and partly in the cab on the way to work this morning.
I did tell him, though, that I surprisingly enjoyed myself and it felt really really good to be in that classroom.
Okay sure, some of them had been pretty rowdy, and sometimes we didn’t really have their attention, and things would have gotten out of hand if not for the invaluable assistance we got from their teacher who stepped in to manage them when they got too noisy.
But despite that, it still felt good to be in their presence because their exuberance and youthful energy felt contagious, and I haven’t felt that young since I was maybe their age.
I was unfortunately late for our second day because I underestimated the traffic (I never thought I’d ever say that about Singapore ever). When I strode into the room, the students all stood up on attention.
Embarrassed by my tardiness, I waved my arms for them to sit back down, saying, “It’s not necessary,” to which I got the reply, “Why not?” So I let them go ahead and greet me.
On day three I was early again. Our lesson was about the newspaper, and I found out that they didn’t have one for their school, which came as a huge surprise to me, since school papers are a thing in the Philippines.
We had them group themselves for the activity, and we noticed that they became more enthusiastic about reporting than the previous days, probably because now they were in groups with their friends (previously they were forced to be in groups with the people sitting near them).
Whereas before we had to practically beg them to come up front, this time they voluntarily did so even before we asked them to. Perhaps the activity had something to do with that as well. They all laughed a lot at the news items that their classmates had created. Some of them, like Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez breaking up, I understood, but most were just alien to me. Ah well, generation gap.
We were not able to do the last activity because we ran out of time and their teacher was in a hurry and clearly wanted us to leave so she could start on her lesson, something that involved paper cups.
So we jumped to the last segment, calling them one by one to come up front and receive their certificates of achievement. I mispronounced a lot of names, causing the room to break out in titters each time it happened.
Then we asked for one big group picture with everyone before we left. Some of the girls asked me to stand near them.
It was a really fun experience for me and I want to do it again.
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