Prologue
Would you believe me If I said, “This face was once bright gazing at the teacher in front
of him with so much curiosity and the hands were jotting down the knowledge scattered
on the board”?
Passing all that catastrophe, the children in Tigray are now going back to school. One
leg or one hand does not stop some of the children.
Story
During the Civil War, I developed a learning space and quickly fell in love with teaching.
What fascinated me the most was the different ways in which my students learned: for
8-year-old Teklay, math clicked through traditional games; but for 5-year-old Hermela
and 13-year-old Natinael, storytelling was the key.
This sparked a quest in me to understand how we, as people, learn and how I, as a
teacher, should teach effectively. I began devising teaching methods to capture my
students’ attention, adopting techniques that seemed to work and discarding others that
didn’t. After two years, my partners and I engaged 187 kids in the open area for
learning, Aspirers of Wisdom.
Returning to school after the war, I saw school with a new mindset. I began new
studies, exploring books like “The Grassroots of Education," trying to grasp more about
education systems. And I started to journal my observations around the classroom.
Page two of my journal is written, ‘Instead of just laying out topics at the start of a
semester, how about inspiring the students with real-world connections to the content?’
The bottom third page is ‘Ahha question of the day’ and below that is written, ‘Every
student gets a thought-provoking question every day.'
This transformation from student to educator has exposed me to new ways of thinking
and crystallized my purpose of nurturing the youth. The idea of school has become
personal.
Epilogue
In Paideia week, I would love to teach my fellow peers at Reed about how education
can be a beacon of hope in times of despair. I would share my experiences from Tigray,
demonstrating how learning can thrive even amidst chaos and conflict. I would introduce
them to the unconventional teaching methods that I adopted, which were tailored to the
unique needs of each child.
Through this, I aim to inspire my peers to view education not just as a means to an end,
but as a powerful tool that can transform lives and communities. I believe that by
sharing these insights, I can contribute to the Reed community by broadening their
perspectives on education and its potential to effect change.
In my lectures, I hope to share with them the passion I have for understanding teaching
and learning. and I want to show them that every child, regardless of their
circumstances, has the right to learn and the potential to excel. This, I believe, is one of
the essences of Paideia - the complete education of mind, body, and spirit.