I love my job!

I feel so lucky to have a job where many times a month, I return home feeling exhilarated and energized, and with a strange urge to tell everyone around me how great life is. This happened to me multiple times this week, including just now as I returned home from giving a parent's workshop in one of my schools.

I arrived to the school (an hour away) only to realize that I had completely forgotten to bring all of the posters that I had prepared for the workshop, which contained all of the information that I was planning to use. So after some frantic running around, calling a Peace Corps friend to quickly e-mail me the materials and hurriedly copying everything onto the classroom whiteboard, I finally (even more nervously) started the workshop.

The topic of the workshop (per the request of the school director) was discipline - a topic which I am clearly no expert on since I don't have children and haven't studied how to be a parent, but thanks to the Peace Corps resources I felt confident that I was giving out fairly sound advice. I explained the drawbacks of using physical punishment as a means of discipline, explaining that giving "appropriate consequences" to children is more effective. I gave examples such as taking away privileges, giving extra housework, charging money for damages, withholding allowance, and grounding. I also explained that consequences are more effective when they are related with the "offense" - if a boy uses his mom's money to buy himself ice cream instead of the rice she asked him to buy, then he should have to pay back the money or maybe get his allowance withheld.

The second half of the workshop was dedicated to an activity in which a group of parents were given a scenario in which a child broke a rule, and the parents had to come up with an "appropriate consequence" to punish the child. In the first workshop (there were 3, each 45 minutes long, with different groups of parents) the parents didn't really get it, saying that they would just tell the child that what they did was wrong, and maybe hit them, "but only a little bit". For the second workshops, I made sure to explain the activity more clearly, and read the examples of consequences out loud a second time since many of the parents are illiterate, which I forgot about during the first workshop.

The first group of parents (in the second workshop), again, didn't really get it. Then the second group got up. They spontaneously chose to act out their scenario, so that two grown women were pretending to be two little boys running around their house, eventually breaking their parents' mirror. The "parents" calmly admonished them, and informed them that as a consequence, they would have to give the parents enough money to buy a new mirror. The "boys" responded: "Wow parents, I can tell that you must have been going to a parent's school where a nice lady from America gave you some advice on how to be a parent!" I laughed out loud and literally had to restrain myself from jumping up and down out of happiness that someone finally understood the activity. The majority of the rest of the parents for the rest of the afternoon also gave great answers/consequences, although no one else acted out their scenarios.

Anyway, so obviously this was a small victory. But, so many times here, I (or a teacher) will give a great lesson, and then during the discussion questions at the end of the lesson, we'll realize that the students absorbed absolutely none of the information. So, when even the simplest lessons sink in with the audience (as they did today), it's a cause for celebration!