I love the fact that so many of us are prepared to put into practice a lot of the things that Penny suggested on...
I love the fact that so many of us are prepared to put into practice a lot of the things that Penny suggested on Sunday. Many of you tried out something the day after! What stayed with me is the power of storytelling. I am retired, but I do a lot of volunteer English teaching. This Saturday I am starting a Film Club at the only public teacher training university in Ecuador. We will be watching Pay It Forward and (as a pre-screening activity) the facilitators will ask the students to tell us if they have done any "good deeds" recently. We had a planning session today and decided that we will all tell them about one of our good deeds. My facilitators are dedicated, pay-back-to-the-community expats / Peace Corps volunteers, so it'll be easy for them to give an example and allow the students a little time to think.
I already have my story: I worked in a refugee camp in Greece in May at a school for children from Afghanistan. Don't ask me why, but the camp and the school were dismantled yesterday and one of the volunteer teachers there is now moving to Athens to help Afghan families settle in. She has a gofundme page and I donated GBP 100.00 to her saying that I am so proud of her grit and resilience. I went back to the page to see my donation, but it wasn't there, so I repeated the transaction with the same message about grit and resilience. When I went back to the page again, I could see both donations with the exact same comment: clearly, I was impatient and made a silly mistake. It took me some time to get in touch with the gofundme people to edit the comment saying that I was proud of Catharine "twice over".
This leads me to the issue of authenticity. As it happens (I call it the Alchemist effect), 13th of November (2 days after the film show) is World Kindness Day. We will encourage the students to do something for someone on that day and then write up the experience. We then hope to publish the edited (but not over-polished) texts onto an appropriate webpage. I need to add that ours are non-English degree students, and it takes a bit of time and effort to create meaningful and engaging extracurricular activites for them.
I already have my story: I worked in a refugee camp in Greece in May at a school for children from Afghanistan. Don't ask me why, but the camp and the school were dismantled yesterday and one of the volunteer teachers there is now moving to Athens to help Afghan families settle in. She has a gofundme page and I donated GBP 100.00 to her saying that I am so proud of her grit and resilience. I went back to the page to see my donation, but it wasn't there, so I repeated the transaction with the same message about grit and resilience. When I went back to the page again, I could see both donations with the exact same comment: clearly, I was impatient and made a silly mistake. It took me some time to get in touch with the gofundme people to edit the comment saying that I was proud of Catharine "twice over".
This leads me to the issue of authenticity. As it happens (I call it the Alchemist effect), 13th of November (2 days after the film show) is World Kindness Day. We will encourage the students to do something for someone on that day and then write up the experience. We then hope to publish the edited (but not over-polished) texts onto an appropriate webpage. I need to add that ours are non-English degree students, and it takes a bit of time and effort to create meaningful and engaging extracurricular activites for them.
That's a great story. I hadn't thought of the power of stories before Penny mentioned it, but I do know that students love getting to know their teacher, so I'm sure they will love that story.
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful story. I hope your film club students will be able to hear your story and the story from the film and find ways to personalize and create their own stories.
ReplyDelete