a class on the meaning of ignorance

Year 4 had dancing classes so we had a smaller group this week. It was good because someone misplaced the key to the classroom I normally use and we had to sit in a smaller one.

I can now say without a blink of the eyes that I am enjoying the teaching... a lot.
We had a nice session with both groups, but specially with the older ones.

I had promised to start using the textbooks I got from the Buddhist Council.
I asked them to open on page 38, that has a description of the enlightenment.


The text describes how Buddha talks about how Prince Siddhata sees how the root of suffering is ignorance. So we discussed the meaning of ignorance.
In my example, I explained that if I steal something, I do it driven by selfishness, I do not care about the other person. Selfishness was not realizing the other person's suffering.

I then asked them to give me their examples where we caused suffering because of ignorance.
Some of them included

• 'When we do not help mom clean the dishes. She has been working all day, and we just want to sit there without doing anything.... We do not think about her.'
• 'When we do not help in the house...'
• 'When we eat more than our share of food and leave dad or mom without enough food'
• 'When we make noise and misbehave in class, we do not think about the teacher and how he is also a person.'

Regrettably I can not quote word by word by these where pretty much the examples they came up with. I thought they were pretty good.

We then only had 5min to sit, but everybody was so quiet that I just let them sit for an extra 5min. Again I was very 'one' with them when guiding the session.
I can see that the advantage of that is that I can relate the meditation to what we discussed in class (e.g. sending metta to mom). I am not sure if this is the best, maintaining a routine is alo very important. Although for this I have well established the bell and taking refuge three jewels.