Random Acts of Kindness

          As Youth Developers in training one of our tasks was to plan a service learning activity with one of our school placements. From the beginning we were told that we would be evaluated but weren’t given defined criteria. We all began to stress and imagine the worst, aka that we would fail the assignment, be publicly humiliated, and then be sent home.

Tamika(middle) and Kazia(right) giving their friend
a heart for a hug. 

                We were given 2 months to come up with an activity but was given no real guidance as to how long the activity should be, what it should entail, or that we would eventually have to give a presentation in front of ALL of our superiors explaining in detail the steps that were taken to reach our final outcome. However, seeing as I am anything but a procrastinator I chose to ignore the fact that I was missing this vital information and hadn’t even been to my school assignment yet, and started researching service learning activities. Before I knew it I had started and finished my plans within 24 hours.  My idea consisted of two steps. The firs t is something I stole from camp (Shout out to Frost Valley YMCA! ) We use to have an activity called Random Acts of Kindness. During this block of time your cabin could chose to do a selection of things: Set up the dining hall, make jewelry for another cabin, help paint something around camp, etc. The one I incorporated for my activity is called Hearts for Hugs. Every child is given cut out hearts and then is told to go out and find someone to give the heart to in exchange for a hug. For my activity I added that they also had to pay that person a compliment. The idea of this was to get the class thinking about what it means to be nice to others, how it feels to be nice, and the types of reactions they would get. I assigned the activity right before lunch, so they were all given an hour to give away 3 hearts. When they came back we talked about all of these things and then I introduced the main activity. This is when my boss came to observe and evaluate me.

Miss James admiring her hearts 

THIS is the funny part, and not a haha laugh out loud kind of funny, a shocked/”wow this is something I will have to get use to” kind of funny. I’m use to being in an American school system where on the first day of class we are given a list of all the necessary materials, a schedule of our assignments, and the criteria that we will be evaluated on. For this project I found out that I would be observed three days before the activity, found out I would have to give a presentation in front of my superiors that would be based on very specific criteria which I received THE DAY BEFORE I was doing the activity, aka yesterday.  At that point there was not much I could change, I had been working for weeks on acquiring the necessary materials to do the project, and working logistics out with my counterpart, Miss Lazore. While my project was pretty simple and to the point, there were definitely things I would have done differently had I been given this information when I had received the assignment.  

Andel writing his Letter

                So as soon as Eugene got there I tensed up and tried to remember the steps I had laid out to explain me reason behind the service we were doing, aka the learning aspect. This is when I introduced the second activity. While researching idea’s on service learning I found a website that had a registry for chronically ill children in America.  So for the rest of the afternoon I had the children write letters to their assigned pen-pal.  The literacy level of the class is way below where it should be at so I had to write sample letter’s for the class so that they could copy and fill in blanks. Of course I stressed myself out for no reason, and as always everything worked out. Eugene was impressed with my ability to control the class, however little does he know that as soon as he left the kids completely lost focus and were bouncing off the walls like they were on liquid crack. Overall while the activity went relatively smoothly and can be deemed a success the experience made me see how much  do not now, nor ever want to be a teacher. Anyway to conclude this entry, I can happily say that today is not the day I failed, got publicly humiliated, or got kicked out of the Peace Corps.