May Project week 3

On Monday, Sandeep and I taught a kindergarten again.The school was Sorrento Springs Elementary School in the parkway school district. This elementary school was weird to me because school started at 7:30. That seemed very early for kids to be up and active to me. Our classroom was interesting because every once in a while, the kids would have movement breaks where they would dance to kids youtube videos. They also had recess and snack time during the middle of one of the lessons. One little girl named Maya was a very good participant during the activities. As she got up from her desk to run outside for recess, she looked me in the eyes and said “AWW I miss my mommy.” With a straight face and a sad tone in her voice. I felt sad for her. But she seemed to forget about it when she came back in. This day of teaching was problematic because most lesson incorporate discussion into them. Because the kids are in kindergarten, the questions are often time easy and fun to answer. This caused most kids to raise their hands and do the little kid thing where they go like “OOH” and do the little jump up and down so they can be seen. This made us call on everyone who raised their hand, and this eventually led to us just going around the classroom. We had to skip many parts of the lessons and go rogue. Everyone still loved us. Tuesday I was running late to the office. I get a text from Sandeep saying “Bruh there’s some Nigerian dude working with us now.” I thought it was a joke until there was really a Nigerian dude working with us. He had a very thick african accent and rushed his english words so it was very hard to understand him. I didn't even understand him when he first told me his name. I left early and went to my second may project, JBS for the first annual JBSAV festival. It was terrible at first because nothing was working right and none of the student danced to the below mediocre student beats. However things got better when I started up the popcorn machine. The all school song creation aspect was a failure and the submissions we got were unusable. This stressed me out because the song was going to be shown at field day and I tried to pull out of showing it at field day because I was afraid of this outcome and the task seemed very unrealistic, but Mr. Barton pressured us into trying to make up an entire song from scratch. Luckily Terrell put in countless hours with me, and we came up with a great song for Kennedy to sing. On Thursday, Tulo (I think that is what the Nigerian guy’s name was) and I were the only ones there because Sandeep had an AP test. Hearing his story as an immigrant and seeing St. Louis through his lens opened my eyes. He was New York so St. Louis was a big wake up call. He spoke about how divisive people made St. Louis out to be, but his experience was totally different as a Nigerian college student at Webster University. Talking to him and comparing stories made me realize something and put certain things in perspective for me. I felt bad for judging him based off of only being around him for a day and not actually trying to understand and just trying to get him to be quiet because it was awkward not understanding him. I’m going to try to not do that in the future.

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