More on intention. I have spent quite a bit of time teaching the third and fourth graders and teaching/observing the first and second grade class. I should not even use the word "teaching" because as Greta put it so eloquently, "there is a difference between being a teacher and telling kids what I know."
I am not a certified teacher but I understand that there are building blocks to learning. You can't learn to multiply fractions until you learn how to multiply. If you don't know your ABCs, reading is gonna be hard! And those are the very elementary concepts of the building blocks of learning but you get the idea. I think I wrote in another post about how many of these kids don't have literate parents so they were not read to at home before showing up for kindergarten. Disadvantage. There are 8 and 9 year olds in kindergarten. I am not kidding. So many parents want for their children what they did not have but some still don't value education, and if they get started, the child is already at a disadvantage. All problems that I am certain are being tackled in the US and in other countries as well as many humanitarian organizations.
Intenion was the conversation Greta and I had with the teachers. We are trying to introduce the idea of what Greta said. Teaching is not just telling them, and making students repeat what you said or copy down what you wrote. It is teaching children to think, to have opinions, to know stuff automatically (I DRILLED the multiplication tables day after day because it should be rote - but they are doing it by tick marks), and building on solid foundations. This is really, really hard when there are no resources - not even a copier to make worksheets and the teachers don't necessarily have great training. But there are things that can be done, though it requires a lot of searching on their own each night, thinking through what can challenge students to really learn . But there is hope, I have seen it in the othe schools I have visited and in spending time with the Wesley kids. This has been a lot of experiences and processing on a topic I know only a little about so I am curious to see where it all leads.
As the wise Greta also said, "A house doesn't make a home and a building doesn't make a school." This project is, yes, about a building, but it will go much further than that. We want students in that building thriving, growing, speaking up, and changing their families, communities and nation.