You know what people tell you all the time right, you just need to step out of your comfort zone from time to time. For people like me – on the spectrum and easily exhausted – that advice is pretty scary. What do you mean to step out of my comfort zone? Just leaving my house in the morning already counts as stepping out of my comfort zone. Talking to the person at the store to ask where I can find the Hungarian goulash is stepping out of my comfort zone. Sending a kid out of my classroom and then having to talk with them after class is outside of my comfort zone. My comfort zone is incredibly small.
But still. Today I helped out with a project at school called Young Impact. For this project, secondary school kids go through some workshops with a trainer and then have to think of a way to impact the world around them. This is purposefully left quite open so that kids can think of what they find important. That’s what the earlier workshops are also focused on. What are you good at, what do you care about and what do you like? We have kids discover the answers to those questions and help each other as well and through that process they come to a view on where their priorities lie. Then after the break we continued with the process of actually coming up with a plan.
What sort of plan? Well, they need a concrete plan of a thing they will do that will help people around them. To give some examples, two kids are going to clean up the neighborhood and livestream the process. Others are going to organize arts and crafts for a primary school in their neighborhood and others are going to start a dance workshop for mentally handicapped people. It was important that they came up with their own ideas and actually planned it out. So part of their assignment is to contact the organization they’ll work with, think about materials and costs and how to get money for those and all that. It’s a pretty well thought out project.
The big problem I ran into in the morning was the time we had. Having too little time is a problem, but when it comes to dealing with teenagers I often find that having too much time can be even worse. They get restless and with the sun being hot this week they wanted nothing more than to go home and not be in school. Understandable, but we had agreed that they had to stay in school for a certain amount of time. We have to justify the hours they make after all. So about forty minutes into this project it was pretty clear to me that I was racing through the content. It was a three hour project that we scheduled five hours for after all, thinking we’d stretch it out enough to fill the time. This was partially true but I’ll get to that later. That first break I was already exhausted. Several of the kids were done mentally with the games and exercises and just wanted to do the actual assignment so they could go home. Understandable, but I’ve learned that it’s important to stay on the same page with your coworkers. Lucky for me – and the kids, indirectly – I wasn’t the only teacher running into this problem. We talked a bit among coworkers and came to the conclusion that we should speed up the schedule a little bit. We didn’t want to send them home hours early, so what we did instead was give them a bit of a longer break. Some kids wanted to go to McDonalds and why not? It’s an activity week, it should be fun. So we took a longer break and after that we started the final assignment with the idea that once their idea was greenlit by me, they could go home or start working on contacting the necessary people. They need to present their plan proper on Thursday after all. This motivated the students much more and although I had some worry they’d make a quick plan and then head home, I was very positively surprised by them. I think every single one of them exceeded my expectations. I wasn’t half as impressive at their age. And I even found that the groups that were slacking the most ended up having to stay a bit longer due to the plan needing to be concrete and good enough first. But every group handed in something and one duo of girls even stayed super long to plan everything in great detail, making a fantastic project that I really hope they get to make reality. I’m super proud of my kids.
By the time I headed home I told the colleague organizing the project my thoughts and she was glad to hear my feedback. This was only the second year we did this project but she was happy with how well it went this year. Unfortunately for me, I had a pretty bad headache by this time. Although most of the day went well, the first hour and a bit of butting heads with a class full of kids had taken its toll on me and I was exhausted. Swan diving out of my comfort zone like this is good once in a while, it builds confidence, but I need to only do it when I know I have some time available to rest up afterwards. Luckily I have tomorrow off and although I have some work to do, none of it requires me leaving the house, so that’s nice. I am going to bed early though, and hopefully it’s cooled down enough by then that I can sleep properly. Thanks for reading!
Opal Kaharis 