Stay inside the box

One of the first projects that I started when I first got to my village was participating in a program that paid for the school fees and school supplies for a female student at my middle school. In exchange for me buying her notebooks, pens and a French-English dictionary, if she completes a community service project, she will receive an additional stipend of school supplies for the next year.

We’re about seven weeks out from the end of the year, so my scholarship girl, Therese, and I sat in my house this afternoon planning her project. Therese is a quiet girl; she only speaks in class when she really knows the answer or when William, the boy who sits next to her, has done something to really annoy her. So, by “planning” I mean she stared at her fingernails while I probed her with “yes” or “no” questions trying to figure out what she could do.

“Like pulling teeth,” could be a cliché to describe the interaction. But about halfway through this interaction, I realized that, actually, this was probably one of the few times that an adult in her life had asked her what she wanted to do herself. One of the few times that an adult had genuinely listened to what she wanted to say and genuinely wanted to know what she wanted to do.

I’ve experienced this before. In the first meeting of my Girls Club, I asked the students what they wanted to do. They couldn’t come up with anything on their own, but wholeheartedly agreed with every suggestion that I proposed. It was like up until this point in their life, they had never been given a choice, so they weren’t how to respond when given an open-ended question.

I don’t know when creativity is beat (unfortunately usually literally) out of my students, but I’m more interested in the why. Why are my students taught not to be able to think for themselves? Why are my students taught that there is only one right answer for every question? Why are my students taught that to think outside what is expected is unacceptable?