Children Can Re-teach Us

About 4 months back, in a local mosque here, I was involved in a team who was planning to organize a robotics course for kids of age group 9-14. We publicized the idea with parents and on getting good response, we finally decided to start with a 12 week course with classes on every Saturday. We termed this as first semester. We needed volunteers for coaching the kids divided into teams of 3-5. I committed to take the responsibility as a coach for one of the teams as I like to engage in such activities and additionally this will give me a window to spend my time doing something different from my normal schedule.

The reason for putting this blog is my recent experience working and interacting closely with kids. I normally read, watch and discuss a lot about international politics, social issues, economics, religious issues etc. all of which have a kind of ‘seriousness’ associated with them and while exploring these matters our minds keeps reverberating with talks of cunningness, diplomacy, deceit, corruption, indoctrination and what not.

Since I left my hometown Ranchi in 2004 for my bachelors, it’s been a life away from family manners and specially interaction with kids. And honestly I am poor at playing with kids including my nephew. This experience of interacting with kids in robotics classes after a long time was refreshing and wonderful for me. I loved the innocence of their heart. Their ingenuous questions and counter questions and their ‘why’ series of question at the end of every answer until we run out of answers. Their curiosity and honesty for experimenting and trying new ideas, all of that was just cute. It reminded me of my childhood days.

I believe being with children teach us or at least remind us of many things. In childhood, we learn these small things and practice what we learn but as we grow up to adulthood we gradually tend to forget these small things in life that really are important. It is amazing to see how as grown-ups we forget to practice the same lessons that we teach to our children; children can re-teach us the things we tend to forget.

At the end of semester each team team had to demonstrate one of its robots on graduation day in front of parents and other attendees. When my students asked me what to say and do in the demonstration, I told them: "This is your robot. Tell whatever you want to tell to people about it and do whatever you want to do with the robot during demonstration." I remember my childhood days when our teachers used to ask us to mug up a bunch of well written canned lines for demonstrations and presentations. I remember, how much i disliked that. I did not wanted to repeat that with my kids and hence I let them be free to do it as they want it. I believe this allows them to come up with new ideas and perform with a pressure free mind. And indeed they did very well in their demonstration, proving me correct :).

I will end this blog with couple of short clips of my students in the class.