HELPING: good deed or selfishness?
... and then the teacher requested one in 2005 like another colleague of hers. A classroom packed with a few bored, some tired and a couple of enthusiastic faces can be very hard to excite and more so about a topic like disaster preparedness. But it’s five of us; we can handle them, right? Maybe, let’s see. We walk into the classroom and divide it into five groups of 6-7 children each. With our own topic to talk about, we disperse and attend one group at a time. All of us were nervous, but soon realized that it really wasn’t that hard. In fact, it didn’t take me long to feel a completely different way about the whole project. I felt much more confident about the importance and success of the assignment and walked out of the classroom a champion in engaging young students in a much evaded but important subject of disaster preparedness. Initially for the students it was just an hour-and-a-half minus school time and I wasn’t sure if I had turned it into something more productive as I had intended to but I had surely hoped so. However, the feedback from the parents and subsequent thank-you notes to our club strengthened our confidence in the validity of the club and its activities. A strange sense of pride comes with the realization that one has contributed to s...