Part 1 of 3 here.

(Part 2 of 3 follows)One fine day, at school, the teachers talked to the children about Afghanistan. They talked about the devastation, lack of schools, necessity to educate the children and things like that. They also showed a short movie clip and images being powerful than words, the movie really drove the point home. At home I heard stories about how the children do not have classrooms, they do not have food, some times they don’t have mommies or daddies, and how some mommies and daddies are building schools and how we can help Afghanistan by giving them our pennies. The seed was sown.

On a Saturday morning we went on a coin hunt and dug out all the coins stashed away at the most unsuspecting places. Chula and Mieja have loosely heard the term money, but do not know much about it. So I had a sudden spark to teach them the various money denominations. So we made different piles, one with pennies, one with nickels, one with dimes and one with quarters. Chula was able to pick up a coin, read the denomination and put it in the appropriate pile. For Mieja, I first showed her how to compare the coin in her hands with a coin in a pile and when she placed it in the right pile I said, ‘That is a penny’ or whatever was appropriate.

I noticed that Chula made two piles of every denomination – two piles of pennies, two piles of nickels, two piles of dimes. When I asked her what the two piles are for, she said that one was old and the other was shiny and she proceeded to tell me that she was going to throw the old pile in the garbage because…well they were old. So I had to explain to her that we could still use the old coins because it has VALUE. She was puzzled. As luck would have it, we had a bake sale by our junior high students in our school. They lay out their goodies at 2.30PM sharp and target the kids skipping out with a parent and ‘stressed-out-I-need-sugar-N.O.W’ teachers. I strongly suspect that they make more by selling to the latter category! Okays, at the bake sale we bought two pieces of banana bread for fifty cents each. I gave Chula five old pennies, a shiny nickel and four shiny dimes. She handed it over and got a slice of banana bread. I asked her if they accepted her old pennies or asked her for new money. Even if she only kind of got that concept of value, I was sure she wasn’t going to throw money in to garbage *whew!*

One of the days that followed, we were a late for school and I was getting in to my irritable self and I snapped at the kids and Mieja reminded me in her usual loving and kind manner, “I am not your friend. I am not listening. I will scratch you and run away with appa and akka and go and live in a different house.” So I launched a lecture on how it is my job to be in my classroom at a precise time, we are all working for money, without which we will not be able to buy anything, even for this other house she was going to live in her appa has to work for and he needs to be ON TIME for that work. Okay not the best way to teach that money does not grow on trees. But soon, I will find a sensible way to make them understand this concept.

Now, HOPE accepts donations in our neighborhood on a regular basis. I give away things like the children’s books, toys, puzzles, clothes etc. I have been doing this for the past three years. All of a sudden, Chula made a connection and asked me if all this stuff is going for Afghanistan. I clarified that people in need are all over the world, not just in Afghanistan and we help in some degree that we can. This she hasn’t completely understood because she has seen images of Afghanistan and none like that in the US. So she continues to believe that the donations we are making for the holiday toy drive our school is doing and the canned food we buy for second harvest are going to Afghanistan. Every day she wonders loudly, “May be teacher X will go to Afghanistan to give the children without mommies and daddies the toys/soup.”

Pretty soon, there will be questions about poverty most importantly, ‘what is poverty?’, ‘why are some people poor?’ etc. I do not have an answer for them right now, but I am sure, I will come up with one at the time of need.

Correlating my thinking process and how the children responded I could come up with a web, that roughly looked like this.

Disclaimer: This was mentally mapped in 6 minutes and by no means a comprehensive list. It varies much with the personality of the adult and the personality of the children.

But the point is one simple seed like Pennies for Peace has lead to something called a ‘curriculum web’.

Links

Pennies For Peace

Part 3 of 3 on teaching styles, learning, broad learning Vs deep learning, how children for associations.

[tags]Pennies for peace, Afghanistan, Curriculum web, teaching children the value of money, preschool curriculum for money[/tags]

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, Curriculum web, Pennies for peace, preschool curriculum for money, teaching children the value of money

(This is part 1 of 3)

Mieja neatly polished off the entire plate of ribbon pakoda, masala peanuts, maida biscuits I made for Diwali, in record time. This is a child who will stare at food on plate for days together and claim that she didn’t eat it because the food was not her friend. So I was naturally surprised and as a reflex I checked under the table. Finding no eatable of any kind stashed under the table, I asked her, with my eyebrows raised, “Oh, wow, you finished everything!” I had already offended the said child by looking under the table. So she replies to me in a very condescending tone, “Yes amma. We don’t waste food. Do you know people in Afghanistan are starving? They don’t have any kind of food to eat.”

Why Afghanistan? Will do a post on that later.(Part 2 of 3)

[tags]Afghanistan, pennies for peace, people starving, wasting food, preschooler eating snack[/tags]

Technorati Tags: Afghanistan, Mieja-isms, people starving, preschooler eating snack, wasting food

I am the proud owner of an iPhone. The process of acquiring the device itself will fill a post, but this post is not about that. It is about how the iPhone is doing what exactly I wanted it for.

It has crashed five times in the small two month time window I have owned it. In fact this is the second iPhone in two months. I had to return the first one and get a replacement because the first one simply died and didn’t want to wake up. As fate would have it, I had it in my pocket and was lying on the floor with partial weight on the phone for a good five minutes. I thought that I had crushed the phone to death and had nightmares of Apple voiding the warranty. But the Apple genius(?!) assured me that it was not me but the phone. But, crashing and giving me heart attacks, that is not I wanted the iPhone for.

Of course I must mention that as a cell phone, the voice quality sucks. I always think that the person calling me is underwater or travelling through an unending tunnel. It has dropped calls or sometimes it would directly go to voicemail and the voice mail notification would come a good three hours later. The tops was the time I was standing in our school lobby talking to our receptionist holding the phone in my hand. My colleague calls me from our playground, she was a good 10 feet away but we were within each others eyesight, to ask me to get something from the classroom before I joined her in the playground and I did not get that call. So she had to yell loudly, ‘Hey, you with the phone that does not work. Get X from the class.’ That sure did the trick. (That said, my colleague also owns an iPhone and she swears that she prioritises her pay check as rent, iPhone, kids, food.) But, to loose calls and be out of reach while owning a sophisticated 3G piece of technology, that is not I wanted the iPhone for.

I do my homework on the phone while my class kids are napping, I save my drafts and email it to myself and make the corrections while at home. I take pictures of my Chula and Mieja (also small video clips) and send them immediately to extended family, which is greatly appreciated. During extremely dry class lectures, I whip the phone out and secretly browse the Internet, thaks to open wireless connectivity in educational institutions. I also do the physically-present-but-mentally-disappearing routine while some one is boring me to death. I get the phone out to check something and when people have shifted focus, I slowly walk a couple of feet away. Voila escape from the harrowing situation! Me being an direction challenged person, the step by step driving directions and telling me exactly where I am is extremely convenient. Definitely pluses and yes some anti social behaviors, but yet these are not what I wanted the iPhone for.

I am checking email and my blog stats all the time. I go in a non stop loop-> yahoo -> nothing -> gmail ->nothing -> blog stats, who is on -> nobody -> yahoo and so on. But the problem is I neither get that many emails nor blog hits a day. So it is kind of a bummer. But giving me the realization that I am not that popular, that is not what I wanted the iPhone for.

I teach Tamil in a language school on Sunday mornings. It is Aug – June school, once a week on Sundays for 90 minutes. It starts at preschool level and goes all the way up to high school level. It is a well run outfit and has ties with the school district and the high school students get foreign language credits for the Tamil classes they take with this organization. I teach first grade and my class has six children between the ages 9 – 12. The first class the only word I heard was B.O.R.I.N.G. It was boring to read, it was boring to write, it was boring to make conversation, it was boring to open the book. Mere existence was sooooo B.O.R.I.N.G for these kids. Of course come class three, all but one were totally in to it, they were eagerly participating doing home work and playing along. Yes all but one I repeatedly got the answer from the said child that the parents did not get my email updates and hence the child was unable to perform the quota of homework. Initially I would note down the mom’s email ID again and come back home to check for typos and by the time the next Sunday comes it was still, “But my mom did NOT get it”. After the iPhone, I heard the story about the mother not receiving email, I asked child to write down email ID on a paper, I whip my iPhone out and check the email and ask child to explain what ever is going on. The said child’s jaw dropped, not because of being caught red handed but because of the iPhone Ahhh my coolness coefficient, it just sky rocketed in seconds! That is exactly what I wanted an iPhone for and it is working ))

PS:
Said child still does not do home work. “I lost my hand writing note book” is the recent excuse.

The Apple genius swears that the new software on my iPhone WILL take care of the call dropping and battery problems. At the end of the s/w upgrade, I lost my data yet again. But I am skeptical about the improvements I was promised.

I live in constant fear of dropping the phone or spilling water on it.

I wear clothes without pockets to force myself to leave my iPhone in my purse in order to cure myself of the iPhone addiction.

My right index finger is slowly becoming a hook, thanks to typing papers on the iPhone.

I have promised myself that I will not touch that iPhone other than to check directions while I am driving.

But COOL, that I am baby!

[tags]iPhone, iPhone problems, Tamil class, dealing with pre-teens[/tags]

Technorati Tags: dealing with pre-teens, iPhone, iPhone problems, Tamil class

Conversation I

Chula: Amma, I am Princess Leia.
{Since I always hear about Cinderella-Binderella types, I am surprised she said Leia.}
Me: Who is Leia?
Chula: She is a princess.
Me: OK. Where did you hear about her?
Chula: E told me.
Me: Hmmm. Where is she from?
Chula: She is from Star Horse. E told me.
{She is nodding her knowingly.}
Me: Star HORSE? What is that?
Chula: It is a game that E plays with his sister and mamma and daddy.
Me: I see. Tell me about this Leia from Star Horse.
Chula: She is a princess. She gets very sick and she dies. Then her mommy comes looking for her and she plays with her mommy.
Me: Plays with her mommy? I thought she died already?
Chula: *Sighs*. Ammmmaa, she is not real. It is some one else’s imagination.

Conversation II

We are leaving to school on the day before Halloween. Chula is a butterfly and Mieja is a ladybug. We are late and I am on my millionth instruction for them to sit down and put their seat belts on.

Mieja: Amma, what are you dressed as?
Me: Seat belt.
Mieja: Amma, you don’t have a costume?
Me: SEATBELT NOW.
Chula: Oh, baby she is dressed as herself. She is she. Don’t you see?
Mieja: Yeah!! And she is scary when she screams.
Me: Uh….. *what the hell?! I am standing right here, have some courtesy girls*

[tags]halloween, kids say the darnest, star wars, Princess Leia[/tags]

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