Le vendredi 11 Janvier 2008 14:32, Geilfuss Charles a écrit :
> Manual,
> You *obviously* haven't spent much time with teenagers. ;^)
To the contrary. You'd be surprised. But the more salient experience I had
worth mentionning here was during my mandatory army time. Not being really
into sports (that's a euphemism), I volunteered to supplement in a public
college located in a maximum socialy challenged area. Basicaly, they expected
me to be something between a prison warder and a police officer, both jobs I
obviously couldn't fulfill. To cut corners in an otherwise long and dull
story, I had a good time there, kids behaved all right with me, they
respected me enough to not engage into despicable activities while I was
around, and some 10 years later still cross the street to greet me whenever I
go back to that town.
I don't pretend I have a success recipe, but what certainly helped me was 1) I
never ever treated them like lesser beings ; I alaways addressed them as 'Mr
X' or 'Miss Y'. Teenagers are really sensitive to equity, and the #1 benefit
was they found really natural and easy to address me as 'Mr Viet'. 2) I
always took time to explain and discuss rules before I had a chance to
enforce them. Once, one of the kid told me it wasn't easy to break a rule
after having understood why it was enforced - simple truth, isn't it ? 3) I
never enforced a stupid rule and made clear with the management I wouldn't do
it. Not being in a direct hierarchical relationship with them, it was
certainly easier for me (I was always considered a soldier by statute, even
in jeans). And I helped some kids fighting the few inept teachers they had to
cope with (most were dedicated if not exactly gifted in the required social
skills, but a couple were truly monuments of human stupidity).
What I did discover is that everybody loves to play, especially those kids.
You can achieve amazing results as long as you don't shove 'you must' and
'you should' by the ton in their hears. They are eager to improve, but by
trial. If you ever say the words 'don't', 'teach' or 'learn', you've already
failed : it's been ingrained in their mind that teachers are dull and
learning painfull. As I had access to some unused credits, I set up a photo
laboratory which worked extremely well, were I talked about basic chemistry,
and a computer club which was a major hit. But for the computer club I had no
credits left, so I picked up two not so compatible 8088 based PCs being
decommissioned (15 yo old each, imagine), and I loaded them with an Assembly
Language program (freeware). I tricked them to program their modules to try
to beat mine at games we wrote (like tic-tac-toe). So I explained concepts
like APIs and function calls just by talking with them, looking at
possibilities our program could 'discuss' over a virtual 'board', how we
could share structures (tokens positions), etc. I have to mention the kids
were in technical classes where they were supposed to learn skills like
programming digital machines. Most were terrible at that. But some months
into the year, the main professor came to ask me how the members of my
computer club could have become so proficient with machines driving. That's
because they had made the theorical concepts their own instead of copying
endlessly the same parrot talk. I didn't told him that, but really, it's not
that difficult a concept to grasp !
--
Manuel Viet
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