Yesterday I had the unique opportunity to visit an international school here in Egypt. My Educational Psychology course requires that we visit a school where we can do a number of different things there, I chose to participate in running a Disability Awareness Campaign. Three other girls in my class chose the same project so we became a team! The planning for our campaign was rather haphazard. We knew we wanted to do activities with the students, middle school-aged, and keep them engaged in what we would teach them about what it means to have a disability. Our professor didn't agree with some of the activities we had planned and other material things, like a wheel chair, were difficult to come by. We only had a few weeks to do this and had to use what resources we had collectively.
One girl had a driver (fancy eh?) take us the school. We were there really early, which is good, we needed to prepare. We had been slacking on the teamwork and compilation part of this entire project. We saw the room where we would be giving our power point presentation and edited our power point because this is the first time we had seen it with all of our slides together. We made sure we were ready. And we were, except... where was the projector and screen? I guess the school was using it elsewhere. The one thing we needed to make sure worked and we couldn't check until last minute! It was really easy to make me stress out at this point, midterms week is a scary thing! Everything worked and the students were quiet and patient with our long presentation. Thirty-five of the students went with us into the courtyard while the other 35 stayed in the "Drama Room" for the Bullying Awareness Campaign, presented by other students in my psychology class. I was treating it like low ropes or deck games at camp. They were about the same age as campers and equally excited! Middle schoolers love when classes are cancelled (actually, all students tend to love that). We had them get in chronological order without talking, asked them to identify objects with a blindfold on, had them try to read lips while wearing headphones, and challenged them to button up shirts using only their non-dominant hand. We had about 40 minutes for these activities and the kids loved participating! It was really great, much better than any of us had expected. We gave them certificates saying they had successfully completed "DA Day" which is just the name we gave our campaign.
The school is an international school with grades preschool through 9th grade I believe. Everything is in English but the students were all Egyptian. The teachers and administration were from all over, but of course fluent in English. The adults weren't really helpful to us, I'm not sure if they were supposed to be, but they didn't help calm the students down or anything like that. They just watched and were entertained. That was somewhat irritating. Anyway, this school "likes to incorporate spirituality into everything." They had a mosque and all the students were praying before it was time for their session with us, very different from anything I've experienced in my schooling. My group had another psychology student from the US in it, I think that gave our campaign more intrigue than the bullying group. The students were fascinated with us and our different accents. A group of girls told us that they hate it in Egypt and wish they lived in America (they had lived there for a short time previously I guess). As fun as the project was, interacting with egyptian middle schoolers, I am so glad it is over. Now, to write the paper about it all.
The midterms are over, just two more classes and it's spring break time! I definitely have spring fever! Our break is almost two weeks so it's really too bad no one is coming to visit me. It's okay, I'll forgive you.
behind me is the mosque!
sunsets here are really something! I'll have to save all the pictures I take of the sky and make an album of just that. also, this is looking out away from campus, all the buildings you see are unfinished skeletons of buildings. Thanks for reading! Love you!
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