My first teachers' day!

"Thanks to your job as a volunteer we are transforming teh future of the childhood and youth of Colombia"

Since almost 3 weeks I started volunteering as a teacher on entrepreneurship with a foundation called COLOMBIA EMPRENDEDORA (they are the colombian chapter or Junior Achievement International). Junior Achievement uses hands-on experiences to help young people understand the economics of life. In partnership with business and educators, Junior Achievement brings the real world to students, opening their minds to their potential.

It's been a very special experience, I give classes to 10 - 11 year old children (5th grade) on entrepreneurship related topics. The foundation has a very well developed curriculum that is given to all volunteers (a funky bag with workbooks for each student, name tags, pens, and all kind of didactic materials to play games and simulations) and the only thing we need to do is to put our personality into action and run the 1 hour class.

Each module takes aprox. 5 classes and you pick one day a week to go to the school (for 5 weeks.) You can run modules all year long if you want, yo can switch grades and schools. The not that easy part is to wake up early! Yes, since we volunteers normally start working at our offices max. at 9.00 a.m., our classes take place from 6.45 to 7.45/8.00 a.m. , so that we can make it on time to our offices.

Coming back to the title of this post, well ... today is teachers' day in Colombia. At this day normally kids (I also did when I was at school) bring gifts and congratulate our teachers for the amazing profession they picked and the great support they offer to us. While being at the last years of school and the first years of university I used to give also private classes of german, english and in some cases, even general "homework making" support to kids - so I can't deny that being a teacher and a mentor has been sin always enjoyable (and profitable!), no doubt. But today, was the first time that I was in front of a class and kids came to me and hugged me, and kissed me and some of them gave me some candies as a gift. Extremely sweet. It was also complemented by the e-card you can see above I got from Colombia Emprendedora.

I thought for myself at the end of the class - it's wonderful to be a "PROFE" (the word "profe" is the short/kids used version ofthe word "profesora" which means teacher in spanish"), you are not just putting your skills into action, but contributing to an aspect of education that seemed to be completely ignored: entrepreneurship.

I hope to post at some point again more about my volunteer teacher experiences and some fotos of my class.