Learning Camps

In today’s world education is indispensable and as students, it is our responsibility to spread the knowledge that we have gained from our helpful teachers. A group of students took an initiative to start a learning camps for free with the help of school’s faculty, I was influenced by this idea hence I decided to be a part of it.

We were divided into pairs of two, my partner and I were assigned to teach basic English to the children living in the village nearby.  My partner and I worked collaboratively and used our creativity to design new activities to teach English, we decided to split the participants into 2 groups which allowed us to provide more attention to the participants.

We expected the participants at least to be 10 years or above although on the first day we had many participants below 10 years and we decided to teach them too because it would be contradictory from our goal which is to helps these children to learn basic English and it would also be unethical if we only teach a set of students. The first English class that we conduct was moderately good because the participants were able to understand the activities and it was fun for them although this made me realized a strength that I possess which is to design/create activities that are helpful in learning something and I would like to focus more on this strength and develop it further.

There were no problems between my partner and me. At the end of the class we use to revise what we have taught and most of the times, the participants would have understood what we have taught hence I was able to identify two of my own strengths: I am good at working with a partner or a team and I can do a moderate job when it comes to teaching English.

The first challenge that I faced was the communication barrier between participants and me, all the participants use to speak the regional language ‘Gujarati’ where else my Gujarati is not very good. The second challenge my partner and I faced was managing the participants because the number of participants was increasing after every class and the third challenge that I faced was managing my time table. I tried my best to overcome the first challenge with the help of my partner although it was hard but, due to my commitment, perseverance and proper collaboration from my partner the challenge was eliminated. We were able to overcome the second challenge by maintaining an online record of the participants although the hardest challenge was maintaining my timetable because the learning camps were scheduled after our schools hours were over and I use to reach home 2-3 hours later than the normal time hence my timetable was disturbed which resulted in me getting lesser sleep, although with my commitment and perseverance I was able to manage my time table and overcome this challenge by completing my sleep on the weekends. Due to this challenges I was able to develop new strengths/skills like speaking moderately good Gujarati and properly maintaining my time table.

We tried our best to treat each and every participant equally and we were unbiased when we were teaching them because we decided to achieve our goal ethically. We also decided to focus and engage with issues of global significance like global warming and poverty, we collaboratively planned a creative activity which helped us to spread the information to the participants about the possible causes of global warming like carbon emission and possible cause of poverty like corruption and unequal distribution of income. Overall, it was a good experience which allowed me to learn new things.

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