Today was HOT. I knew that it would be – Ghana is at the equator – and it is in Africa afterall, but as I was hammering in nails with the students today around noon I suddenly I thought it had started raining - only to realize it’s my own perspiration dripping on the Mahogany. Blech. Gross, but accurate.
Yesterday I taught drafting to my lead students- Kotay and Gabriel. We already built one chalkboard and so I thought I would teach a few of the basic drafting skills. I had the students walk over and measure the pieces of wood, the chalkboard, and then come back to draft it in scale. This would take only a few hours at most- right? Wrong- all day!
Here’s what happened…..We first had to make a drafting board and clamp it to a wobbly table. We had problems with the T-Square staying “square” to draw straight lines. The “machine shop” (the outdoor cabinet making company we visited that was a shed with power tools in the yard) used inches and feet but the students were working with the metric system so every measurement had to be converted- so a mini-lecture on fractions/decimal conversion distracted me and then I suddenly realized that Gabriel has gone MIA.
Gabriel was back in a class. I asked his teacher if he could come back and work with me and he came back for a few minutes and then slipped away again. This happened about four or five times…all day….did I mention we were trying to get some drafting done? I didn’t get it. He had been gun-ho about every other part of the process so what was it? Was he frustrated with the math or getting tired of erasing crooked lines? What? I spoke to Greenie about it while walking her home from the hotel (she stays with Charles’s family- Kate and I stay at a “luxury” hotel). Greenie said she thought that Gabriel was getting jealous of any attention I was giving to Kotay -- Gabriel is quiet, a little stoic, withdrawn- very polite and intelligent but seems reticent to let down any walls. Kotay, on the other hand, is outgoing and humorous and in-your-face engaged. I hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t engaging Gabriel as much as I was Kotay. This made sense….every time I would turn to see if Gabriel was grasping a concept he would be gone.
So today I tried a new tactic.
The students and I had built two bookcases and we had the pieces already cut for a third so I gathered the troops and said that today they would be building a bookcase all by themselves and Gabriel’s job was to be the “boss.” They were to practice working as a team and Gabe would make the final decisions on matters. This did the trick- Gabe was in his element and the others were snapping to his lead. I do this a lot in my stagecraft class and the hardest part is sitting back when you see the kids make a mistake.
I’ll try to keep this short (Ha ha- kate calls me Steinbeck b/c I’m so wordy)… when you put books on a bookcase the weight travels down thru the material into the floor so the shelf has to be able to transfer the weight to vertical sides of the case. We added 1”x1” strips of wood to support each shelf on the vertical boards –little ledges for the shelf to rest on. The students accidentally put the supports above the shelf instead of below on one of the sides. So if the kids assembled it as it was, they would have discovered the mistake themselves but…
Charles is an amazing man- he first graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering at the polytechnical college in Ghana then ran companies successfully before giving all that up to chase his dream of building schools for children. He has built Tuskegee International School from the ground up. It’s built on “family land” – land that was won from another tribe in a war hundreds of years ago - and it has stayed in the family ever since. This means that it has not been “aquired” by the government, something that seems to happen often and leads to lots of litigation and family feuds. Although the area is now well populated, when he first started to build the school it was heavily forested; Charles started by clearing the land- cutting down the trees by himself and the roots on the trees in this area are huge. It is impossible to look at the school and surrounding area, homes, stores, a major road within 100 meters, and think just 15 years ago no one was here. So he has been in charge of every step of the construction for the past 15 years often doing the work himself. He supervises the workers he sometimes hires to pour concrete or lay tiles or run electrical lines- everything that goes on is in his eagle eye. He has to be- this is his passion – his creation.
Back to bookcase---- Charles spots the error the kids made from across the compound and comes over while the students are at snack time and picks up a tape-measure... I quickly go up to him and say “I know- I know- they put them on upside down, but let them figure it out themselves”- I believe they need to be able to correct their own mistakes. Charles says okay and thinks it is important for them to learn... But – 5 minutes later he is pointing out the error to the kids. Arrgghh- I get it. He can’t help himself- it’s his nature. But it was frustrating – I was looking forward to the moment when the kids figured out their mistake and were able to fix it with out an adult butting in.
The kids were oblivious to all of this and took his correction in stride (they are used to it) and did a great job working as a team to build the bookcase. Gabriel shone as a team leader and kept Kotay in line and they had fun and felt very proud of their efforts. Charles said that this bookcase would have to go in his office because it looks so nice. Kate says that this was a good reminder that sometimes you get to the hoped for outcome despite your own plans and/or frustrations. This goes for me and the students today.
-- joey
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