The Hermit and the Well

For the first lesson of this term I picked The Hermit and the Well a short story by Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Nhat Hanh is a fantastic writer. The book tells, in first person, the story of a boy who goes on a school trip to a mountain to find a hermit. They do not find him, but the boy finds something much more important while sitting next to a well.

The story raises a number of issues that can trigger discussion. The kids were interested in knowing if the story was true, or if it could even be true. It also can be used to discuss how when we hurry we do not see the beauty of what lays on the path, or how we sometimes find what we are looking for, in something that looks completely different.

I was actually feeling pretty awful before the class. I had read the terrible story of child abuse and was feeling very sad. But somehow the kids were the quietest they have ever been. The class was fantastic. I had decided to read the story while we 'played' freeze and the distractors, and offer to give candy to those who won. At the end I gave a candy to each of them, because they had all been so good (I actually ran out of them half way).

With the older ones, I used the remaining time to discuss the story. It always amazes me how people can have so different interpretations of a text.
Note: Before starting the reading I asked what a Hermit was. Very few knew the meaning, so one of the kids explained it.

End of term

For the last 3 weeks, Monica, a Volunteer came to the class to help with the teaching. She was really nice and I was hoping she would be able to teach Kindy and year 1 that currently have no teacher. On the second week she made the case that it would be better to teach in a school that has no teacher whatsoever. She was probably right.

The kids behaved pretty bad the first two of these weeks. The third one I started sending the restless ones out, to their normal class.  I will have to keep strict on the discipline or we will have the same problem I had last year.

The classes have not been as structured as they used to be. We worked on a historic topic on alternate weeks. 

When we discussed the four sights, I showed a snippet off the BBC video.

Siddharta was very sensitive to what happened around him so the King was very concerned about the type of things he saw and heard. But Siddharta wants to see the world.

The story tells how Siddharta leaves the palace with his friend/servant  Channa. On each excursion he sees an important sign, and on each occasion Channa explains how that could happen to anyone: A sick man, is the first one, then an old, and a dead man. With these first three sights he faces for the first time the suffering of the cycle of life. On the four one he sees a monk, begging for food. And Channa explains that he is a wise man looking for answers to the problems of life.

On the last class the kids wrote on small cards, made by the Buddhist council, their name, year and an act of kindness they did recently. We then read and discuss them (without saying aloud who wrote what). The Council will collect them all for the Vesak celebrations.

   

  

Interesting books

I am trying to learn about what Neuroscience has to say with respect to emotions, a very hot field of scientific research. I just ordered three books that seemed promising. They are not Buddhist at all, but I hope to find they have something interesting to say:

Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion - Richard D. Lane;

The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind - Marvin Minsky

Affective Computing - Rosalind W. Picard

circles of metta - loving kindness

Every once in a while I get bits of inspiration out of nowhere. By serendipity I end up making up an activity that engages students much more than other activities. Last week it one of these.

With the older ones (about 12 this year) we did almost 15 minutes of meditation. Most of them where sitting pretty quietly by the time I finished the session. We stretched, talked a bit and then I thought another 5minutes of sitting would be nice.

I asked them to sit in groups of 3-4. I ended up with 2 groups of 3, a group of 4 and two groups of 2. They had to sit in circles. The exercise was to send loving kindness 'energy' to the person on the left. This way the person on the right was sending 'metta' to myself and I was sending metta to the person on the left. Metta circulated clockwise in each group. I asked them to feel the energy coming in through one arm and leaving through the other. It seemed that liked the activity.

We then discussed what they felt when they meditated. They mostly said 'calm'. 

Surprisingly they could not come with examples of other situations where they felt the same way. I said that I felt somewhat like that when I sat in the beach, listening to the waves and feeling the breeze. They did not seem to click on the simile, so I think they enjoy the beach in a different way :-)

SRE workshop - a success

I have been with a flu and classes just started at Uni, so I had not able to report on the funtastic workshop organized by the NSW Buddhist Council.

We followed the program for the day quite closely:
10:00 - 10:10 Welcome and meditation
10:10 - 10:50 Daniel Yeo “how best to use the Come & See CDs” gave us a great show, with music, dancing and a lot of ideas on how to make our classes more fun.  The CDs of D-Kidz, his group, can be acquired in the website.  You can listen to samples in his site or from Buddhanet here. The songs tell the story of Buddha and as such they can be very useful. Note, some of the lyrics have religious connotations common in asian countries, but that not all teachers might want to bring to their classes in Australia (or other western countries). As I told Daniel, I wish I could sing and entertain like that!, but as he replied 'if you can't sing, use the CD!' 

10:50 - 11:10 DET Representative on their protocols. A discussion of mostly administrative issues, but the lady who presented provided some useful materials.
11:10 - 11:30 Michelle Corby “meditation with children”. Michelle told us about her experiences and a discussion followed.
11:30 - 11:40 Break
11:40 - 12:00 TC Lim “the Dhammapada”. TC Lim, a long term benefactor of different Buddhist organizations told the personal story of editing a version of the Dhammapada, and suggested looking into it as a source for children stories.
12:00 - 12:30 Ven Jin Rou "Teaching Ecology through Buddhist Stories" read some of the stories she has written.
12:30 - 12:50 Group discussions

We then went for a delicious lunch at a restaurant in Crows Nest.

Thank you to Roselin and Brian for organizing this