Henry Hengle Wang, 7Ca, BASIS International School Shenzhen

I am an official “reading buddy” at my school, and that means I read some books to two kindergarten kids before Physics class in the afternoon. I originally signed up to this post because I thought it would be interesting to actually teach things to young kids, instead of just being taught by others, but after two or three sessions, I began to regret my initial sanguine choice of signing up for this troublesome task.

Last Friday, after rapidly finishing my lunch in the school cafeteria, I rushed up to the second floor, not wanting to infringe on the rule of being on time to reading session. I always feel awkward when I stand in the doorway trying to spot my assigned kids. I always just skip this embarrassing process and simply let the teacher look up the list of reading buddies and signal my assigned kids to come forward.

Now, I’m going to talk about my assigned “buddies.” One is called Benson and the other is called Aaron. They are completely different in character and therefore it is difficult to control both of them. They like different kinds of books, so whilst I was reading to one, the other was running around the classroom trying to join other groups.

Aaron is relatively shy so I always spend more time with him. Benson is always wandering around the room, picking up children comics and peering into other children’s books. Last Friday, I totally didn’t know what to do to attract the attention of both my “buddies” so I just decided to teach both of them the world map, after spotting a section about the Earth in a book whilst reading to Aaron.

I looked around the room to see where Benson was, and sure enough he was devouring a book filled with pictures of trains, cars, tanks, and planes. I told him to put it back into the right shelf and dragging him over to the world map pasted on the windows.

I decided to arouse both of their interests in world geography by asking them a simple question, “Where is Shenzhen?” Aaron answered by pointing to the place on the map that is supposed to be Calcutta, India. I asked Benson the same question and he actually pointed to the right place, which surprised me, because I thought I myself didn’t know that when I was in kindergarten.

I thought that attempting this subject was very auspicious, because for the next half hour or so, we just went through the entire map of the world, with them pointing at specific locations on the map and me saying the name of that region or country to them.

I guess this could at least help them a bit, since I thought the memorization skills of young kids are the best, according to some newspaper articles I’ve read in the past.

The 30 minutes seemed to pass by very quickly, and at the end of the lesson, they had already learned where Shenzhen is, where Shanghai is, and where the United States is. I guess this could be a suitable first start, considering their ignorance in any topics, virtually.

But what was different for this lesson is, apart from the exasperation that I expected to get, I also at the same time achieved a real sense of accomplishment, having taught the children something which could possibly benefit their future instead of wasting their time.

This really contrasted from learning something from others, and for the first time in my life, I am considering the profession of being a teacher, for its true feeling of accomplishment and its importance in shaping the future adults of this world.