Kids, Kids, and More Kids

Last kid-filled week was very hectic for me. In addition to teaching and preparing for summer school during the day, I have also been preparing and managing Vacation Bible School in the evenings at my church.

For almost two weeks, the summer school students and I have made peace with each other and I had really enjoyed teaching them. Currently, the biggest challenge my students are facing is their inability to cooperate with one another. For example, for the first time in five years of using a customized Jeopardy game to test knowledge of the eight parts of speech, I have discovered that these students don't know how to compromise, share, and cooperate with each other. Even my students with learning disabilities knew how to work together to win the game. These summer school students, on the other hand, either broke down in tears or waged war with each other. Fortunately, a bigger portion of my students understood that the game was a fun way to review and found value in the activity, but I was quite surprised at how some of the students simply refused to listen to each other.

Another case in point: I assigned a group-reading activity for this week. Each group consists of seven students and their mission is to read a story (different from the other groups), complete a story map for the story, and then act out the story for their other classmates. Today, their only task was to read the story and they decide in their group whether to read the story out loud together or to read the story silently to themselves before convening the next day to complete the story map. One girl refused to work with the others in her group and was quite defiant with me when I encouraged her to sit with the group. I told her that she didn't have to read out loud if she didn't want to, but she was still being very antagonistic. Another group could barely talk to each other without gouging each other's eyes out. "Losers!" "Weirdos!" "Dumb-@#%*" were the exchanged words through their tears, fists, and pouts. One group had some gender-tension issues, but at least they were able to separate themselves from their silliness to almost finish reading their assigned story, albeit in their boys versus girls cluster.

In VBS, I dealt with not only a much younger audience, but also a small staff of 30+ volunteers. We had over eighty kids each night and on the night when we had the most kids, we had to make do with the largest shortage of volunteers. It was challenging trying to maintain the kids' attention long enough to say "Jesus," especially in the closing assembly. However, I have to hand it to God to show me just how powerful He is. Despite some "interesting" kids and their very "special" way of expressing how they contribute to VBS, I had really enjoyed my time as director and offered to be director again for next year. Both the senior and associate pastors informally agreed to my offer and so I vowed to start organizing VBS in January 2009 instead of within the last two months when I found out that I was chosen to be director before the program actually kicked off.

I have so much admiration for the parent volunteers who work and support their families and still manage to find time to volunteer at night for VBS. Kudos to them! I was exhausted by Tuesday and Wednesday, but I didn't have a family to worry about (although D threw out his back and had to be treated gently and slowly at home). I'm a little disappointed that not more people could show up to help. I try to understand that everybody has other obligations to attend to, but I look at the ones who could volunteer and wish that if others could try, they would have helped so greatly. Educators and volunteers of other children's programs can attest to what a big difference an extra pair of hands, eyes, or ears can make when dealing with children en masse.

I'm also awaiting the arrival of my god-daughter who was supposed to make her entrance into this world last Saturday, but to our dismay, she's making everyone wait longer in anticipation for her appearance. I'm on standby in case she decides to come out sometime during this week. Yes, I'll commit to going out to Vancouver as soon as I can and drive back for work if I have to.