Painting benches with children

I spent this afternoon helping my friend with one of her school projects. This particular project is a part of a thing called Design for Change.  Many of the fellows working in schools are getting their kids involved with this type of project.

The idea is to engage the children in a process to improve their own environments, to give them the power of ideas, to foster the possibility of positive change. In a nutshell (a tiny, one peanut nutshell), the kids are responsible for picking an issue that is important to them, designing a strategy to address that issue, and executing that strategy. From what I can tell, it’s about empowerment and creativity and action.  Kinda cool, right?

Hannah’s students chose school beautification as their project – which feeds into Hannah’s super-awesome overall plan of incorporating art and design into the school infrastructure and into education in a way that I’m not even going to try to explain here because I will inevitably get it wrong.  But take me at my word, it’s pretty great.

Ok, so the specific task at hand today was to supervise the children while they painted benches.  Sounds simple enough, right?

There were five classes (of about 30 students), five volunteers, and five teachers. There were five pints of paint, about a dozen paintbrushes, and five tarps.  There were probably 60 benches to paint. Ok, go.

I’m not sure what exactly happened in all of the other classrooms, but here are the highlights of my group:

• The teacher mostly sat and watched me try to manage this group of kids.  At times she was laughing – one might say she was laughing maniacally. Ok, maybe not maniacally, but laughing she was.  If I were her, I would have too.
• All the children crowded around me demanding that they be the next one to paint.
• The school leader kept coming by and telling the kids that only the boy children should be painting, even though the girls clearly wanted to and were doing a great job.  I defied him, obviously.
• I raised my voice… I did, and I am ashamed.
• Red and purple paint covered my hands and arms, completely.
• I’m pretty sure there was a bucket of red paint thrown across the room at one point– no, this didn’t happen at all - this was only happening in my mind.
• The kids were super duper enthusiastic.  So.much.energy. Wow.
• I think, I hope, the kids had fun.  They did.  And so did I, really I did. I made lots of strange faces at the children that at least made them smile.

It's kind of hard to tell in this picture, but this is my "WTH, kid" face:

Ok, so I’m not meant to be directly involved with children every day.  That is certain - and I understand that well.  The other classrooms seemed to be a little better managed than mine. But oh well.  It was fun.  It was nice, if not tiring, to be around the kids. (I came home and took a nap.)

I have all the respect in the world for teachers and for my fellow fellows working in schools.  You are amazing.

See, don't these ladies look like they have it more under control:

 
Sorry, Hannah that I wasn’t a better volunteer…

(Pics courtesy of Hannah)