a projific life

19Mar11

Right now, it’s my first real Saturday morning in a while that is not involved in traveling, or other events. It means that this morning will be spent  organizing my space, my constructs, and developing some project implementation strategies – in other words, do the work that has been accumulating over the last few months.

The end of February was amazing and fun (as was the first part). The day I left for my COS conference, I received a phone call that my extension was approved. This led to the reward of piercing my ears, and to the biggest smile that lasted for a week and multiple high fives. The COS conference in the Carpathians was also great. I took some project work with me to do, but then decided I should just take a real vacation, and be present. I don’t think I’ve ever really relaxed or been so comfortable around so many people. It was amazing to see my groupmates again, and get to spend 4 days where it was just the 49 of us. We’ve all changed so much, and it’s not just in the clothing we wear, but it’s something that emanates from body posture and the way of confidence and patience. For me, what was cool, is that I always think of myself as this quiet, awkward person, but I finally saw what other people see when they look at me.

I thought we would be able to start the wheelchair accessible project and the mosaic thing at the beginning of March, but I had to make two unplanned trips during the first two weeks of March, which is why this week was the first full week where I’m actually home. During my first full week home, we had the second seminar to the Project Design ‘program’ for 8th – 10th graders, which began in December. In that first seminar, we tore up dictionary definitions of a leader and a project. We spent two school days thinking about what these two words actually are, and used the Scientific Method to talk about the stages to project implementation. You should have heard everyone saying the Projectific Method – and it worked! They remembered. One of my favorite moments was this small 9th former saying, “If a project fails, you should think about what can be better, and then do another project because you can learn from that. If a project is successful you should do another project anyway, because doing something is important.” By the end of the seminar, 5 groups of students designed a project. We had a difficult time getting the students to make realistic projects that were attainable during winter.

On Thursday, we learned that of the 5 projects planned, 4 were implemented. Cool huh? And they said some really cool stuff. One 10th former said, “When people walked up to us to ask what we were doing, I was surprised. I knew I was ready to do something, but I didn’t think my town was ready for projects. Now I know they are, and that feels good.”

The reason for the second seminar was to evaluate the projects, and to add new skills. In this second seminar, we took the ideas of learning styles and creativity to use as a medium to talk about leadership and project design. Thursday had many confusing elements because we evaluated projects and then switched to learning styles, but the fun part was in being able to be outside and play games. The highlight of which was one 10th form boy saying he can only play with boys because he would win if he played with girls. It felt really great to beat him in Finger-Fencing (the index finger version to thumb wars). Friday was a cohesive day of awesomeness. We made a good link between what was our last activity on Thursday, which was a tangible way to experience the way projects and leadership work together (we folded origami and each person had a challenge – some of them were blindfolded, some had to stand, some had music playing in their ears, etc.). The morning was theoretical, and the afternoon was theory in action – ie playing inventive sports, where students are given recyclable materials and told to make a game. The final thing was they planned a new project to do in the next 2 months. The result? Every single group – there were 5 again – had a very simple, realistic and interesting project…cool, huh!?

This Project Design ‘program’ has been amazing to plan, along with being exponentially amazing and fun to conduct. It was great to run around, joke with teachers, my sitemates were awesome in it, laugh, and have fun with these ideas. There were students that I work with who aren’t very interested in school work, but it was cool to see them interested and excited about what we were doing. So yeah, this is the story of how awesome the last two days were.

I’ve learned I really get excited and invested in something when it involves trainings, and that it’s especially fun, when you’re given the freedom to do however and whatever you can think.

PS. Hello, SPRINGTIME! goodbye mottled-hands-winter

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