One thing have I desired of the Lord,
that will I seek after: to behold the beauty of the Lord. Psalm 27:4
Go to the people.
Live among them.
Learn from them.
Love them.
Start with what they know.
Build on what they know.
But of the best leaders,
When their task is accomplished,
When their work is done…
The people will remark:
We have done it ourselves! -John Perkins
How sweet it is.
It is impossible to explain the absolute joy I
have wandering the dusky streets of Ankawa under blinking florescent lights:
rows of glitzy hair salons, green grocers heaped with tomatoes and melons and
herbs, shops full of brightly colored plastic things from China, and old men
gathered around backgammon boards. Smoking and spitting diesel generators fill
the air with black clouds of stink.
People always tell me to “Be safe,” and I have
made little jokes about Kurdish soldiers with machine guns on every corner
protecting me, but actually that is not true. The guns are gone. I am safe
because of the very sturdy values of community that permeate the smiles much as
the scent of cardamom.
Yesterday the crew needed to change some
dollars. So, we asked around the small square where to change money. Everyone
kept pointing to the chip vender, the guy with a huge vat of boiling oil next
to heaps of thinly sliced potatoes. We finally believed them and went over to
his stand, and yes, he literally had thousands and thousands of hundreds and
twenties in a small glass box. No guns, no guards. Just neighbors. The Kurds,
btw, have a word for a hundred-dollar bill; they refer to them as “papers,” and
ten thousand dollars is called a “booklet” as in “I bought my car for three
booklets.”
But yesterday, wow, what a moment.
So our very first day of class, just two weeks ago, we
closed with a SWOT exercise, and the teachers all filled out a half a sheet of
paper with their teaching Successes, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
That evening Charity and I sat down and sorted through the rather garbled
English and felt absolutely almost as totally overwhelmed and drowning as these
hard-working souls trying to tackle teaching, teaching in a second or third
language, inquiry-based learning, backwards planning, and the honestly vaguely pretentious
and certainly abstract language of International Baccalaureate, all while
trying to produce a perfect six-week interdisciplinary unit including the
Learning Activities and Summative Assessments with the goal of creating
students with the characteristics of the IB learner:
inquirers, knowledgeable, thinkers, communicators, principled, open-minded,
caring, risk-takers, balanced, and reflective.
No problem.
We put together a Student-Will-Be-Able-To list,
neatly filling a very large self-stick easel pad with a LONG list of Threats,
ranging from “being able to cover the entire Scope and Sequence” to “Classroom
Management” and “Differentiation” and “Creating engaging and fun lessons.” And
while it is always good to have posted objectives, in a way, this list was like
a big fat diesel cloud of anxiety. So much to do, so little time.
Anyways, our close yesterday was, “Let’s go over
this list again, and see what lessons we need to put together this weekend.
Thumbs up if you got it, Thumbs down if you still need clarification.” We had
to practice a little bit with the first one, but I prodded up all of the
thumbs. As I looked from face to face, I was quite sure that each one knew how
to take the S&S objectives and turn them into units under the
transdisciplinary themes and central ideas with lines of inquiry. Wow. So, all
thumbs up.
And the next one too, “Classroom management.”
Good plans lead to managed classes. Charity’s cute little class starters seemed
doable. Having engaging lessons the kids would like, cool. All thumbs up.
“Small group work.” Smiles. Yep. We got that
one. Been working on that for two weeks. The thumbs were being held straight up
now. High up in the air.
And we moved through the list. There was a brief
stumbling over “differentiation,” but we moved past it with whispers and
giggles.
And totally the whole thing began to cascade,
with laughter, and after I read the last one about including academic
vocabulary, the class broke into applause, loud and heart-felt applause, and
someone started shouting, “Selfie, selfie.”
And it was slightly odd that the John Perkins
oft-repeated proverb was in my morning Shane Claiborne Common Prayer liturgy this
morning. Well, odd in the sense that once again the Spirit is here in the
morning quiet.
Because we still have a lot of work to do. But
what a good reminder, yet one more gift from God, that the end is all about
empowering and releasing.
Gift number 3412: Thank You for John Perkins.
Yep. Gift number 3411 was indeed “cockroaches.”
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