Stuck in the mud

Once a year, the H.O.P.E. project, my ministry here in Mombasa, runs a Career Workshop for our more senior students – typically the students in Grades 7 through 12 (or in Kenya what would be referred to as Standard 7, Standard 8 and Forms 1, 2, 3, and 4). In past years, the theme of the workshop has ranged from determining potential career paths based on a student’s strengths and likes to having someone from a certain profession, say healthcare, come in and talk with the students about what it is like to be a health care professional and what it takes to get there.

Last month as Coralis, Florah and I sat down to decide what we wanted to do for this year’s workshop, so that we could finalize the logistics for the session, they both proceeded to ask if I would facilitate this year’s workshop. I suspect that they conspired against me, but I gladly accepted as I love working with the students. My role as the administrator of the H.O.P.E. cuts across many facets of the project including financial, administrative, as well as community and donor relations. However, by far, my favorite part of the job is working directly with the students – specifically running tutorial sessions for groups of students as well as tutoring individual students. To me, facilitating the workshop is along the same lines as tutoring as in both cases I have the opportunity to open up the minds of the students to see things in new and different ways, help them to critically think and solve problems, and to encourage them to be creative. So, I was very happy that Coralis and Florah asked me to do this.

On a side note, while I love running tutorials for the students, I’m embarrassed at how much I’ve forgotten since high school and college. During tutoring sessions, I mainly work with our older students, those in secondary school as well as some in grades 7 and 8. I primarily focus on tutoring math and sciences – algebra, physics, chemistry and biology. Since I have both a Bachelor of Science degree and a Masters in Engineering, you would think this would be right in my sweet spot. But alas, I have not used most of this knowledge for a long time – actually decades, but I hate to admit that, so I’m a little rusty. Who remembers from Algebra class what the determinant of a matrix is and how to calculate it? Who remembers from Chemistry that water may function as both a base and an acid. That is, water is amphiprotric! Who remembers from Biology that the lungs are made up of up to 700 million alveoli, which are tiny, balloon-shaped air sacs whose function it is to exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide molecules to and from the bloodstream?

Once I actually review the material, things comes back fairly quickly, but I have to do my homework and spend time preparing. At least it’s comforting to know that this knowledge, which I spent time and effort learning, does still exist somewhere in the recesses of my brain. I just need to reach back in there and pull it to the front.

What makes tutoring especially challenging in Kenya is the way the education system works here. The curriculum is extremely demanding and densely packed. They shove a lot of information down the throats of the students and the hours that students are in class is much more than in the US. The success or failure of a student and their advancement is solely based on how they score on standardized tests. Unless you go to a private school, which is not a possibility for the students we work with in the H.O.P.E. project, the student teacher ratios are extremely large. Single classes can have over 80 students, and sometimes even more, with just one teacher. Given this reality, students get no individualized attention. Students are pushed through the grade levels regardless of their grades, but in many cases, this simply means that they are falling further and further behind. When it comes time for secondary school, students without passing grades will not be able to proceed. For those who don’t have the grades, a vocational or trade school is the only option, if they have the financial means.

OK back to the Career Workshop. Since I was not here in Mombasa for any of the previous career workshops, I decided to start with a clean sheet of paper and not concern myself with how past years’ workshops were done. The first thing I did was to come up with a topic for the workshop. I decided on to base the workshop on what I call Job Readiness skills, meaning characteristics that every person needs to be successful in a job. These are often referred to as “soft” skills. These are not technical or career specific skills, but skills that you need in order to perform both individually and as part of a group. Individual skills include such personal character traits as motivation, self-confidence, and flexibility. Group skills include things like teamwork, respect, and negotiation skills. In the workshop, I stressed how both individual and group skills are important for success in the workplace.

Being a product of corporate America and IBM in particular, I immediately had to create a Powerpoint presentation to organize my thoughts and use as a framework for developing the workshop content. I proceeded to document my workshop objectives and sketch out an agenda for the session, which would start at 8:30 AM and go until 3 PM. As I knew that the students would easily get bored and that I would quickly lose everyone if I simply lectured a lot, I decided up front that I wanted the workshop to be very hands on. That is, I wanted the students active and engaged in learning activities, not listening to me talk. So, I limited myself to 30 minutes of speaking at the start of the workshop to set the stage for the rest of the day. After all, I had to give the students some context in order to give meaning to the activities that would follow.

After much searching on the internet for ideas, I decided on eight activities that I would use. I knew that this was more activities than we could possibly get through in the day, but I’d rather not get through them all than not have enough. I then had to retrofit the activities to limit the cost of the material needed for the activities to stay within budget. As we usually have around fifty students at these workshops, we needed to find and/or purchase enough items to support this number of participants. After much brain-racking, I decided to limit the workshop activities to only use these simple items – pens, paper, popsicle sticks, clothespins, string, rubber bands, plastic cups, and pieces of cloth to use as blindfolds.

I call these simple items, but as I’ve come to learn, nothing here is as simple as it appears. We not only ended up having to go to a number of stores to get all the materials, but finding popsicle sticks turned out to be quite a challenge. There are no Michaels Stores, Hobby Lobby, or Joann’s Fabric and Craft Stores here in Kenya. After walking around from store to store for over an hour, I was almost ready to buy a few hundred popsicles just to get the popsicle sticks. It would have been quite a sacrifice for us to have to eat all those popsicles to get the sticks, but sometimes you just have to take one for the team. Just when all hope seemed lost, we walked into a book store that also sold some craft items and lo and behold, it turned out that the store sold popsicle sticks. There was a half empty box in the display case so I asked the clerk to get me three full boxes like the one in the display. She sent someone in the back to get them, but he returned with only one box. That was unfortunately all they had. We proceeded to buy that one box as well as the half empty box from the display case. We completely wiped out the store’s supply of popsicle sticks. It wasn’t as many popsicle sticks as I wanted, but it would have to be good enough. I ended up having to change one of the activities to account for the reduced number of popsicle sticks, but such is life in mission. You constantly have to work with the cards you are dealt.

Each of the workshop activities was designed to practice one or more Job Readiness skills. I would begin each activity by explaining to the students what they would be doing in the activity, telling them what skills the activity was intended to explore, and then breaking them up into small groups of 5 – 6 students. I would shuffle the teams after every activity so that the students worked with different students each activity. This forced the students to learn how to adapt to working with different people and figure out how to best use the different skills that each person brings to the team. However, the most important part came after the activity was completed. This is when we did a debrief of the activity as an entire group. The students had to answer questions such as: What did you learn about yourself? What did you learn about others? Why was teamwork important for the activity? What skills did you need to use both individually and as a team? Did you or anyone on the team get frustrated? If so, how did you handle it? How can you use what you learned in real life, say on a job?

Once I had the workshop agenda and activities sketched out, I spent several weeks experimenting and tweaking them. As the activities were specifically designed to be team based and not capable of being done along, I solicited the help of the Kenyan family I live with to do practice runs of the activities. Joel, who is in first grade and saw the materials (popsicle sticks, clothespins, plastic cups, etc.) in my room, was very enthusiastic about playing with them.

At the actual workshop, we were only able to get through five of the eight activities I had prepared, which was fine. As I stated, I knew that I had prepared more activities than we could possibly complete. It was more important to spend time on the debrief after each activity and reinforcing what the students learned than simply rushing through them to get more activities done.

Here are the activities that we ended up using in the workshop.

• Cup Stacking Challenge – The teams had to build a pyramid consisting of six plastic cups (3 on the bottom + 2 in the middle + 1 on top) without using their hands. We attached 1 ½ foot long pieces of string, one per team member, to a rubber band. The team could only use this contraption to assemble the pyramid. No hands allowed, even if they knocked over a cup. They had to work as a team to operate the device with the right amount of coordinated tension and control.

• Right Way/Wrong Way – Each team was assigned a job readiness skill. They had twenty minutes to prepare two short role plays – one demonstrating the right way to model the skill and one the wrong way. Take patience for example. You can imagine the scenarios that participants come up with to demonstrate lack of patience. To be honest, this was the activity that worried me the most. I was concerned that the students would not take to role playing and so struggle with this exercise. Boy was I wrong. The students did a great job. Some of them really hammed it up in their role play!

• The Blindfold Game – Each team selected one person to be blindfolded. After the person was blindfolded, the team was given a picture of a structure that the blindfolded person had to construct out of popsicle sticks and clothespins. Only the blindfolded person was allowed to touch the items and build the structure. The other participants could only give verbal instructions. To make things more challenging, the structure had to be stable enough to stand on its own for three seconds with no support. Three teams were able to accomplish this, which I thought was an awesome feat. Most of the other teams were able to construct the structure, but it would not free stand. 

• Time Management Challenge – The teams were given a list of questions to answer in ten minutes. The answers to the questions were lists of things – countries in Africa, cities in Kenya, prime numbers between 1 and 100, chemical elements, top ten countries in the world with the highest population, and a word for each letter of the English alphabet. Some lists provided more point values than others. For example, five points for each chemical element vs. only one point for each country in Africa. Sometimes more points were awarded for getting more items in the list – one point for each city in Kenya, but two points for each city after the tenth one. If you got the whole list, you got a lot of points. For example, five points for each of the top ten most populous countries, but ten points each, or a total of one hundred points if they got all ten countries. The activity was designed so that the students were given way more questions than they could possibly answer in ten minutes. The teams not only needed to figure out how to best manage their time as a team, but they also needed to devise a strategy for which questions to answer to maximize the total number of points earned as well as assign tasks to team members so that they are using the knowledge of each team member optimally and not duplicating effort. Obviously, this is a lot to ask, especially with only ten minutes to complete the task. But that was the point. I wanted them to feel overwhelmed by a seemingly impossible set of requests. None of us have ever felt this way at work!

• The fifth and final activity was a more relaxing one. After all the grueling activities the students completed, they needed to “unwind” a little. We all stood in a big circle. Next, everyone had to reach out to shake hands with two other people, with each hand holding that of a different person. Then the group had to figure out how to untangle the human knot we had created without letting go of each other’s hands.

We concluded the workshop with a session for the students to tell us what they learned. Based on the feedback and the way the students embraced the activities, I was very pleased with the way the day went. Our challenge going forward will be to continue to reinforce what the students learned during the workshop. Otherwise, I fear that they will quickly forget about all the skills we practiced in the session.

At Mass on Sunday during the homily, Father talked about how we can often feel like we are stuck in mud. I can relate to this. As I’ve expressed many times in my blog posts, I often feel this way. I many times feel unproductive and like I’m not making much progress, or at least not making progress at the rate I want. But as Father also said, if we keep our focus on God, He will pull us through the mud. Although, I still many times feel like I’m stuck in mud, I at least don’t feel like I’m sinking. I may not be moving forward as fast or as easily as I want, but I am moving forward. The workshop helped me to realize that being in the mud is maybe not all that bad. As I witnessed in the process of planning, developing and delivering the workshop, God jumps in and wades through the mud with us, guiding us all the way, if we let him. Although I may not be completely out of the mud yet, I take comfort that I’m in good hands.

I came across this quote the other day. I have to keep reminding myself to simply do my best to do everything with love and stop focusing on success and accomplishments.

“I think too, that God is not concerned with ‘what’ we do, as much as with ‘why’ we did it.” —Jim Flickinger, OFS

If we do things with love, God will do the rest if we place our trust in him.

God is good.