What kind of opportunity are you going to be?

 College Hall and the beautiful trees!

My camera broke so....I bought a smartphone. Yes, my first smartphone and I admit, I find it a little addicting. I could do Duolingo ALL day. This morning I kept saying, "Une pomme...Je suis riche," while walking to campus. But, this means--more pictures!

Ruju and I eating our lunch and getting some sun in the GSE courtyard before class.


My week started off with a presentation in an Australian accent.  For the Curriculum and Pedagogy in International Contexts class, we each signed up to do learning experiences, which is an hour of class that your group can do activities and discussions related to the topic for that week. My group was focused on Teacher Education and what better way to generate a fun class with stimulating discussion than with accents, role-plays, math, and chocolate! When my group was meeting, I suggested that we teach a math strategy during a teacher workshop and thought of this multiplication strategy with lines. I pulled up a video to show my two classmates and he had an Australian accent! I was a total lost cause and we were in the little group study room doing all these accents and laughing hysterically. (This was pre-policy brief deadline, so we were all getting a bit weird...) I kept practicing it in my head all week, but my group-members were afraid it would be too distracting and I didn't think I could maintain it for the full 15 minutes of the workshop. Then my classmate introduced the workshop and role play, saying that we were all in Australia for the workshop, so after that....I did what every good teacher would do--I rolled with it. "Good-day, mates!" It made the class really fun and since the others were supposed to be teachers from the context of their curriculum projects (Tajikistan, South Africa, and Ethiopia), a few even did accents during the whole-group discussion. Plus, I was throwing candy at those who participated, which always brightens up a Monday.

Tuesday was another day with the kindergarteners and with Dr. Fantuzzo after an interesting discussion of acculturation in my Self, Culture and Cognitive Development class. By Dr. Fantuzzo's Developmental Theories and Approaches with Children class at 4pm...I was feeling so burned out and overwhelmed with all that had to get done. It didn't help that it was rainy out. However, we watched a 40 minute video from 2020 called "Waiting on the World to Change." It is about two young children and a teenage in Camden, NJ--the poorest city in the U.S. at the time. (Philadelphia has now surpassed it.) It is different to think about poverty, gangs and violence in cities abroad, and quite another to watch a video about those things that are happening just over the river in Camden. All of us were very moved by the video. Dr. Fantuzzo has a nack for knowing his students well and for knowing what we need, in a way. It is easy to get caught up in all the to-do lists and papers and word counts and to lose perspective and we all needed a nice reminder about our reasons for being here. Dr. Fantuzzo said to us, "I have dedicated time to each of you because I believe you are an opportunity. Now, you need to realize that you are an opportunity for someone else. You wrote essays at the beginning of the semester about a significant personal failure. You moved through that failure and others because of people who were opportunities for you. What kind of opportunity are you going to be?" It was exactly what I needed to be reminded of on that dreary Tuesday and something that we should be reminded of on a daily basis.

We have three weeks left of classes. Some IEDPers have already bought their flights for their internship. Soon, we'll all be going off in our own separate directions, some returning to Penn in the Fall, others, like myself, looking forward to a giant question mark sign....but it feels good to know that there is support from the great professors at GSE and my fantastic cohort members who have made this such a great year.