Lesson 4 With The Fifth Graders

I've spent the majority of my time focusing on development projects at the middle school and a little with the high school so working with 5th grades has been a challenge. Today we had our 4th lesson which was about decision making. I started by asking students what we had previously discussed and they actually remembered a lot of things.

Next we pretended that there was an open lot for us to put a business! We talked about how you have to weight the positives and the negatives and the lesson liked this to a decision tree (no, I wasn't teaching them game theory it was literally a drawing of a tree). The lesson plan suggested the three choices be: a clothing store, a club, and a bakery. I talked with Jackie who's taught this class a few times and she suggested getting rid of the club and using a boutique. Great! Then I also have the chance to teach them that, if there is something on every corner, you probably don't need a new one. I decided to make the lesson even a little more personal - instead of bakery and clothing store I used my two favorite businesses from my middle and high schoolers: pool and dairy store/factory.

The kids broke into groups and were each assigned to come up with positives and negatives for a specific of the three choices. After about 5 minutes each group had one pro and one con so they sent a representative to the front of the room to present: 2 groups had "pool," 2 had "dairy," and 1 had boutique. A pool kid volunteered to start, "A negative of having a pool is that then boys and girls would go there and there would be a big problem with pregnancy."

Yeeaaaahhhhhh. I'm honestly not sure if the students were laughing at what he said or at the "can I be fired from a volunteer job?" face I made. My mind was working a million miles an hour trying to find a solution. These kids are 10 years old - I can't be discussing all of this without their parents! What could I say to make it better? Should I tell them to forget they heard it? Would that make it worse? Then I remembered what my host sister (one in high school, not the one in this class) told me yesterday: a middle school student is being accused of sexually harassing another middle school student. It is a tragedy that happened and my heart sincerely goes out to the victim. Knowing the culture, I know it took that person a lot to speak out about what happened and I hope they are receiving endless love and support from their friends and family.

These 5th graders will be in middle school next year and, I wish it was different, but this is part of their lives. It isn't my job to encourage this discussion in a school but I wasn't the one who brought it up - it occurred to this group of students on their own. So I moved the lesson forward with no real comment acknowledging or denying it. Maybe I made the wrong call but I just didn't feel comfortable getting involved in even a harmless seeming discussion.

The class got back on track and we discussed voting, who gets to vote, and how you win an election in a democracy. The students then voted for the option they wanted and they picked pool. I told them that it would be a safe pool and that we would have police so everyone would be fine.

After the class I ran some errands and eventually went to a scholarship girl's house. It's always great to visit the students and learn about their lives which are all difficult and impressive in their own ways. While at this girl's house I had a great conversation with her about how it's a lot harder for Senegalese girls in school because they have more housework than boys which makes it even more impressive that most of the top students are girls.

Tomorrow's scholarship home visits are FAR from my house (we're talking 2km out) so I'll probably be too tired to blog.

KO