By Minako Ogita, Year 12
For IB students, including me, the prospect of missing classes is welcomed greatly. However, Wednesday’s Community and Character Day couldn’t be chalked up to simply that. Aimed to develop our character and creativity, students from all grades attended presentations and engaged in activities which involved subjects that were not necessarily covered by the school’s curriculum. However, this day was also beneficial in a different way for many of the Year 12 students who had been invited to take on the role of teacher for the Year 9s for the half-day; this ranged from giving presentations on global issues to leading classes that enhanced the creativity of the students.
I, along with another member of Youth Underground, facilitated a presentation on Human Trafficking. At first, the idea of teaching was somewhat unwelcome, especially considering how we were both roped into it involuntarily and at the last minute. The task in itself was daunting, in the sense that I didn’t really know how to teach in an effective or coherent way. So after hasty preparations and little sleep, I barreled through the presentation with the single thought of “please, let this be over.”
By noon, after the presentations were over, I felt mostly relieved. However, there was a part of me that truly enjoyed teaching (that is, as much as you can enjoy teaching such a horrific topic). I sensed as though I had learned a priceless lesson as I toiled through each of the slides: teaching is hard. It isn’t as simple as talking at people and hoping they would listen; it’s an arduous tug of war between attention and distraction. Teaching isn’t only about being heard; you have to be heard and understood. Even with the small numbers of people that I was dealing with, I felt that there was nothing more difficult than getting the attention that was necessary to teach.
In my opinion, we could all go quite a long way with teaching. Despite the arduous nature of the task, there was a sense of accomplishment at the end of the presentations. The Community and Character Day was about the sharing of knowledge between people and, particularly in our case, the transfer of information between students. On the whole, as a school community, we all have knowledge that is worth knowing and sharing. We may attend classes on a daily basis, but some things simply cannot be learned inside of the classroom. I think we should take advantage of our diverse and knowledgeable community in order to teach and, in turn, learn from each other so we can expand our views on the world around us.
