Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Listening vs. Hearing

We’ve been running programs here for a week now.  I’ve had several sessions with different kids at different schools and it feels great to be actually doing what I came here to do.  As hard/awkward as this transition has been, I feel like I’m right at home once I start working with kids.  It’s great.

One school I work with is called the Jerusalem School.  It’s run by an American mission, so a lot of the teachers are Americans who commit to teaching a few years over here.  The nice thing about this place is that the kids learn English from a young age and so facilitating initiatives with them is not much different from back in the states.  At this school we work with 7-12 graders (not all at the same time) so it’s nice to have the opportunity to work with older kids.  Yesterday, the focus of our session was “Listening.”  Apparently, it’s a cultural thing here to talk over each other.  Everyone talks over everyone else and expects to be heard, but of course they aren’t and then people get frustrated.  And it’s interesting, because after this happens over and over, you’d think that they’d realize it might be more productive to take turns talking and listening.  But they don’t.  It’s weird.  Anyway, yesterday we spent some time flushing out what it means to be a good listener and what that looks like and of course all these high schoolers are looking at my like I think they’re in 1st grade.  I have them do an initial activity that turns out pretty well.  We discussed the difference between listening and hearing and I felt like it really sunk in.  Then I set them up for one more challenge and chaos ensues!! I had them all blindfolded and they were all (literally every one of them) shouting over each other trying to explain what they should do.  So, of course, as a good facilitator, I let them.  This went on for a few minutes, everyone yelling, nothing happening, people getting frustrated, until finally one guys shouts to another girl “shut the hell up!”  This girl (still blindfolded) hurls her fist through the air and clocks him square in the chest, hard.  So myself and the teachers stop everything and I make them keep their blindfolds on.  I ask them to tell me, by raising their hands, what the problem is.  Immediately they all start talking again.  I wait for them to quiet down again and explain to them I have to treat them like 1st graders because they are acting like them and tell them that they can only speak if they raise their hands and I come by and tap their shoulder.  So they all stood in the circle, blindfolded with their hands up and I walked buy, picked a guy to share his thoughts and I kid you not, the MOMENT he began talking, so did four other kids.  So we went through this several times, I let them try again and ultimately they failed.  BUT as is often the case in these things, success of course isn’t really about completing a task as much as learning from it.  Although the actual activity itself was…horrendous, the debrief was SO GOOD.  It’s what we do this for, to hear kids admit what they did didn’t work and to not blame it on someone else.  They knew why it didn’t work, they knew how to do it better, they apologized for disrespecting others… that’s success.   I guess the real test will come next week when we see if the actually remember and apply what they learned… I’ll keep you posted.

The other school we’re working with is run by German Lutherans.  They came a long time ago and set up a school to give Palestinian students opportunities to learn and grow (and even leave and study outside of Palestine eventually) that they wouldn’t have in the public school system.  This school is a little bit tougher.  We’re working exclusively with 6th graders and their english isn’t that great.  Not bad on them for sure, more bad on me for not knowing their native language.  But it does make my position a little more difficult.  Saleem is my other half, he’s a local, and he comes along and does translation, which is super helpful, and he’s kinda learning the ropes on the whole experiential ed thing.  While it’s good to have him translate, it’s still hard to facilitate because I can’t understand and be a part of the kids process, there’s so much that gets lost in there.  Kind of a bummer.  The interesting thing about this school, though, is that starting in 6th grade, they split the kids based on their behavior/motivation/intelligence.  Section A are the rowdy kids that no one really wants to deal with, Section C are the kids that are gonna run the world someday, and section B are the inbetweeners.  I know there are pros and cons to this and I don’t know how I feel about it and I don’t know the school’s philosophy on it, but there you have it.

At any rate, this process of experiential education is paying off big here.  It’s cool to see and even cooler to be a part of.  And these kids are so sweet.  Little gems. 

Oh and Char’s program is almost up and going too.  I went with her to one of the homes the other day and the kids there make my heart so happy.  I’ll make her get on a write something about it.

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