Day at the Museum

I spent today at the Ulster Museum with 16 primary school children (ages 10-11) and a high school friend, Cathy Arthur, who is the primary school principal. The kids were on a day trip from Derry, where I lived as a teenager.

Cathy's school is Fountain Primary School, which is in one of Derry's toughest neighborhoods. I am in total admiration of her commitment to giving them a start in life that helps open them up to the wider world. There are low income Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods where the most virulent sectarianism is in full flower. Ulster's only hope is that people like Cathy can turn the tide by offering kids a different narrative and a different future than those available to their parents, grandparents, and so on back through the ages.

I've occasionally flirted with the idea of teaching in underprivileged areas. I talked myself out of it (I talk myself out of a lot of things) based on tales of mayhem in inner city schools and based on my own limitations. I'm impatient, which doesn't facilitate helping others learn, and I'm not good at adapting my teaching to others' learning style. I learned this the year I tutored Julianna, a young woman from the Ivory Coast. I just couldn't figure out how to help her learn. I thought I was being very creative, however I talked to other ESL teachers and learned that creativity goes way beyond thinking of a few different ways to define a word. One woman set up a game for a student who loved football. The ball would advance every time he got a correct answer and go backward every time he made a mistake. He got treats when he scored a touchdown.

I would never have thought of something like that. I assumed Julianna was motivated to learn because she sought out a tutor, but she didn't do homework and pretended to have read things she hadn't. Very late in the game I realized that her experience of trying to learn in Ivory Coast was so traumatic (make a mistake and you're beaten, for instance), that we had a lot to overcome to be ready for her to learn anything.

Anyway, it was great seeing Cathy get her kids through the museum and then take a side trip with them to a candy factory. The kids were well behaved and seemed to have a fantastic time.