What can you learn about life and work when someone gives you the responsibility of handling 30 kids for 14 days straight? I'll probably answer this question with a cross-question, what not?
I had the opportunity to work as a trainer intern with Codechef during the summer of 2019. My journey with codechef started by getting trained in pedagogy. We were a team of 8 trainers and were mentored by 2 Teach for India Fellows for 2 months.
pedagogy
/ˈpɛdəɡɒdʒi,ˈpɛdəɡɒɡi/
noun the method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept.
"the relationship between applied linguistics and language pedagogy"
To my surprise, pedagogy wasn't just the skill of teaching. It was an amalgamation of life experiences like trust-building, behavior management, growthful mindset, motivation, discipline, and planning. Our mentors fused all their life experiences of their time with Teach For India into a crash course of 1 week and gave us the best learning experience.
After 1 week, we were paired with a fellow trainer and assigned 30 kids whom we had to teach. We had to start from basic logic and problem solving and take our kids all up to solving questions appearing in Monthly Long Challenges on Codechef. All this was to be done, and we just had 2 weeks. We had 6 hours of daily classes with the kids for 6 days of the two weeks. Interestingly, my group consisted of kids from 4th grade who had never written a line of code, all up to 12th-grade students who already knew the syllabus for the next two weeks. Now, the challenge was not just to teach kids the basic concepts but also to keep the experienced kids interested in the classes.
Guess what, we succeeded. We were able to teach and engross the whole group for the next 12 days, where they fell in love with logic and interacting with us. The joy of succeeding in teaching kids was just a tiny portion of the satisfaction. The real fun part was the bonding and the fun we could experience past the two weeks of mutual learning.
When I look back at those two weeks, I recapture every single step, which helped me build good bonds. The first step in this process is building trust. Because when kids trust you, they will believe in what you say. Your every action would carve their non-opinionated mind. You have the responsibility to carve their purest minds with the most unbiased opinions making sure that they are curious enough to ask you questions.
The next step is to keep kids' self-esteem high at every stage. Kids are susceptible to the actions of their peers towards them. Your one single statement can have a life longing impact on them. And if you know this, wouldn't one want to have that impact to be a positive one?
When you respect your kids and make them feel important and equal in class, you'll experience that the overall environment of the classroom itself becomes growthful.
When I was a kid, my peers who used to give me career guidance told me, ' Teaching is a job of failures.' Suggesting that only those who have failed their primary life goals choose to be teachers. After spending these beautiful 14 days of mutual learning, I still say, 'Teaching is a job of failures.' You fail every day. You failed even if a single kid in your class couldn't accomplish the task. And this gives you utter motivation to try again, try it a new way. You learn, and you gain respect not just for succeeding but also for trying because you know you will keep trying till you succeed. This learning can never be limited to teaching kids, they are lifelong teachings one can apply at any stage of life.
Update: The Internship period was May'19 to June'19. Today is Teacher's Day 2020 - 5th September 2020, almost 15 months after the Codechef Code Camp and one of my kids sent me this message, what could be more adorable? 💙
Comments