Last Friday, I did another day of volunteer elementary school teaching via Capgemini and Junior Achievement. This time, it was in a suburb of San Jose. I had 3rd grade again, but (of course) the experience was totally different as it was a different bunch of kids.

I was surprised, last time, that one kid gave their intended future profession as “Paediatrician”. I was even more surprised that it came up again. I also got five Vets and one Neurologist! I guess the kids, growing up near Silicon Valley and talking to a consultant, want to avoid anything that can be outsourced.

The kids were great to work with, and there hadn’t been any tears by lunchtime. I forgot to touch wood when mentioning this to my colleagues, and so came back to 3-4 crying 8yr olds after lunch. It seems one girl may have hit 2 or 3 others and one of those got so frustrated that she accidentally pushed another girl by mistake. As you can imagine, the actual circumstances remain unclear as it was hard to follow 3-4 crying kids all trying to make their points at once (between sobs).

Their teacher arrived a few minutes later and we brought them all inside and played dolphin sounds etc for 10 minutes while they had some personal time to calm down.

One of the exercises we did after lunch was making a class newspaper. The incident was well reported. One headline was ‘Too much drama for yo momma’ and they all automatically grasped the concept of not naming suspects or victims too early in a breaking story.

All up, a great day. Kids are smart.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 04:53 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.