Help Wanted

Just as interests in finance, fashion, sports, and other subjects can lead to international career options, an interest in helping others also can cause students to find work beyond their borders. In fact, a handout from the American Academy of Pediatrics encourages early adolescents to "try activities that help others." The earlier post, "Hope for the Future," suggests ways, even at a younger age, children can begin to alleviate some of the world's suffering.

It is interesting to see how often young people are in the news for helping others. A child has her head shaved to show a classmate with cancer that she is not the only one who looks different. An Olympic athlete bonds with a brother with special needs. College students spend their spring breaks, not drinking and tanning in Florida, but building a senior citizen home in earthquake-ravaged Haiti. To test out how well a student is suited to help people in a foreign country, the earlier post, "See the World," has information about educational experiences that young people can try overseas while they are in school.

An early commitment to helping others can continue into a life's work, even to the point of extreme personal sacrifice. Missionaries Dr. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol contracted the deadly Ebola virus at medical facilities in Liberia. Father Alexis Prem Kumar, the director of Jesuit refugee services in Afghanistan, has been kidnapped by terrorists, and U.S. AID workers are imprisoned in Pakistan and Cuba.

While helping others in a foreign country entails a certain amount of risk, the abundance of positions available is worth exploring. Start by going to directories for development organizations (devdir.org) and the individual websites of Care (care.org) that fights poverty around the world, the Red Cross (redcross.org) that goes where foreign disasters strike, Unicef (unicef.org) that concentrates on the needs of the world's poorest children, Doctors Without Borders (doctorswithoutborders.org) who are now fighting Ebola in West Africa, and Operation Smile (operationsmile.org) that performs surgery to correct cleft lips and palates on children in foreign countries. Almost every year a nurse friend of mine spends her vacations assisting the doctors at Operation Smile.

Short-term, overseas assignments also are available at organizations such as: Cross-Cultural Solutions, Global Volunteers, Habitat for Humanity's Global Village Program, Projects Abroad, and United Planet. Volunteers in these programs find themselves caring for children in foreign orphanages, rescuing endangered animals, teaching English, digging wells, painting classrooms, and unearthing archaeological treasures.

As a marketer, I have been especially pleased to find organizations like SERRV (serrv.org) that send experienced marketers to help foreign artisans design products that consumers in developed countries want to buy. Father James Martin, in his book The Jesuit Guide to Almost Everything, writes about how he used the corporate experience he had before becoming a priest to help a seamstress in Nairobi, Kenya, gain an income by turning fabric remnants into religious goods for tourists. Artist Iris Shiloh's visit to India and Swaziland inspired her to found Kids for Kids (kidsforkidsfashion.com). She prints designs created by orphans and poor children in lesser developed countries on T-shirts and then donates a portion of the sales revenue back to the organizations that sponsored the little artists.

Hawaiians say missionaries came to do good and did very well (buying land and establishing plantations and businesses). Even if it's not motivated by altruism, going overseas to help others can have benefits. Colleges and corporations look for students and employees who have international experience.
(Additional information about international careers also is available in the earlier post, "What Do You Want to Be?")

International Fashion Designers Find Consumer Niches

On "Project Runway" (Lifetime channel at 9 pm ET Thursdays), this season's televised competition is showcasing the influence of international designers. Sandhya channeled her heritage from India to turn a dip-dyed flowered print into an original summer frock that won the show's first challenge and puzzled her U.S. competitors.

What designers such as Sandhya are doing is satisfying consumers who search for fashions and accessories that express their individuality. They may be motivated to wear T-shirts that support a cause as Vivienne Westwood's "Save the Arctic" one does (See the earlier post, "North Pole Flag."). Or they look for the environmentally, sustainable clothes mentioned in the earlier posts, "The World of Fashion" and "Fashion Forward." Mumbai-based fashion designer, Rahul Mishra, for example, espouses "slow fashion." His garments draw on the craftsmanship of India's embroidery experts and weavers to involve many talented village hands in the process of making his clothes. Why? He sees fashion as an opportunity for participation, not just consumption.

 Some fashion consumers also want to be the first to go upscale to provide employment to those manufacturing luxury brands "Made in Africa." One designer who caters to this upscale consumer is Hanneli Rupert, daughter of Johann Rupert, chairman of the Richemont group that includes Cartier, Van Cleef, and other luxury goods. In 2009, she first introduced her Okapi brand, named for the "zebra giraffe" from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At her Okapi website (okapi.com) and at her Merchants on Long store in Cape Town, South Africa, Ms. Rupert sells bags, card cases, and other African-sourced leather goods. This fall the Okapi brand also will be available online at the luxury fashion Net-a-Porter website (net-a-porter.com).

The New York Times (July 31, 2014, page E5) observed that consumers looking for hard-to-find, unusual products are willing to pay top dollar to artisans with incredible fashion, furniture, and textile skills whether they live in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Peru, or Kenya. This season's "Project Runway" contestants are on the brink of exciting careers.

Learning Can Be Fun

Do longer school days and longer school years promote learning? Only, if they include time for play (and the playground is not an asphalt parking lot).

A growing body of research suggests play provides an important learning experience at any stage of a student's life. Besides, moving develops a body's core strength which enables children to pay attention and learn, and research also finds kids can develop language, math, and social skills while interacting with each other. In Finnish kindergartens, something new happens every day: Monday might have a field trip, ball game, or running activity; Friday, songs and stations of choice, such as making forts with sheets, selling ice cream (paper scoops pasted on a stick and plastic coins used for change), or doing arts and crafts.  You have to wonder about China's academic schools that do not set aside any time for gym or exercise classes. Promising Olympic athletes go to separate schools.

Finland has a saying, "Those things you learn without joy you will forget easily." When it rains a bit, Finnish kindergarteners put on their rubber boots, grab shovels, and make dams in the mud. Before entering first grade, at Swiss Waldkindergartens, Canada's all-day kindergartens, and at some schools in Washington state, Vermont, and Brooklyn, four to seven year olds have child-directed free play outdoors in all kinds of weather. In  contrast, a survey found 7 out of 10 children in the UK spend less time outside than prisoners.

Play at the Nordahl Grieg Upper Secondary School takes a different form, video games. At Mind/Shift on July 21, 2014, Tina Barseghian called attention to Paul Darvasi's article about this Norwegian high school, where Tobias Staaby uses the video game, The Walking Dead, to pose an ethical question. Of 10 survivors, who should receive the last four pieces of food? Students were asked to use what they had learned about situational ethics, utilitarianism, or consequentialism to justify their choices.

 At the same school, the history simulation video game, Civilization IV, which gives students an opportunity to make decisions that leaders have to make about setting up a government, legal system, labor laws, economy, and religious options, has been used to teach English and Social Studies. Those who were unfamiliar with the game's complexities learned from students who were pros. Lin Holvik, principal of the school, always has viewed video games as a tool to foster collaboration and an appreciation for the "art of failure."

Common Sense Graphite, a company that evaluates the learning content of computer games, gives high praise to the following:
Elegy for a Dead World
Better than other English lessons, students visit alien planets inspired by romance poets, write prose and poetry about the lost civilizations they find there, and share their literary works with other students.
Never Alone
A cultural game that incorporates stories from the Inupiat people of Alaska that demonstrate how students need to cooperate with nature to win.
Valiant Hearts
Invites students to apply facts from the history of World War I to critique war in general.

Other video games and their subject applications include:

     Portal 2: Physics
     The Last of Us: Literature
     Republia Times: Writing, Journalism, Social Studies
     Minecraft EDU: Virtual building blocks to construct a landmark or environment (Also see the earlier post, "Build a Global Icon.")

Another type of play to consider is the role playing used in the Model UN game mentioned in the earlier blog post, "Know the Issues." Also see the later blog post, "Convert Stories into Foreign Language Games."

Communicate without Words

It started with iconic computer symbols and emoticon faces made out of punctuation marks, like :-). Then, Japanese emoji (e for picture; moji for character) were used to communicate on social networks, write books, and create digital dictionaries. Now, artist Yung Jake has used emojis from emoji.ink to "draw" portraits of celebrities.

      According to trendwatching.com, Mauritius-based app company, Oju Africa, has created 56 African emojis for Android users that also can be used with apps, such as WhatsApp and Twitter. For cat lovers, free cat emojis are said to be available from free.motitags.com. One caution, sometimes viruses are in free emojis.

     Even before computers, however, people around world have been communicating with music. (See the earlier blog post, "Music of the Sphere.") In any language, the slightest musical mistake sounds awful. Across borders, music has been shown to have the ability to identify children who are in danger of falling behind in key language and math skills. Neuroscientists and neuropsychologists, such as Ani Patel and Nadine Gaab, have found that the mental demands required to play a musical instrument condition the brain to perform well in other areas: language comprehension, memory, attention, precision, switching between tasks, emotional maturity, and persistence. Maybe all diplomats should be required to study music, which seems to enhance the brain's networks for performing other tasks, like listening to each other in any language.

Map Gazing

Before the internet, classrooms often had a set of encyclopedias. One of my fifth grade classmates decided he would read all 15 volumes of the Britannica Jr. that our room had. He started at the end. Not only did the last volume cover subjects that began with "WXYZ," but it also contained an atlas. He started looking at maps and never got any further.

     I was reminded of how interesting he found maps, when I read about a new book, Mapping It Out. One of the maps included in this book is a map of Africa that I used to hang in my classroom. To illustrate the size of Africa, this map fits China, the United States, Europe, India, and Japan inside the continent. This kind of presentation is very useful, since transferring a global world to a flat page distorts the size of countries north and south of the equator (See the earlier post, "You Are Here.").

     Having an Atlas, or a shower curtain with a map printed on it, is especially helpful when countries, islands, cities, mountains, and bodies of water are in the news. Hearing that Narendra Modi from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became India's Prime Minister sent me to an Atlas, when I heard he was born in Ahmedabad, a coastal city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, south of Pakistan. As host to some World Cup soccer games in 2014, the city of Recife shifted our focus from the Amazon in the west to Brazil's eastern tip on the Atlantic Ocean. When hearing that Stephen Hung ordered $20 million dollars worth of Rolls Royces (30 cars) to transport visitors staying at his Louis XIII resort in Macau, the question arose: Where is Macau? Unfortunately, invasions, such as Russia's into Ukraine, and disasters, such as the downing of Malaysian Flight MH17 and the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 and the finding of its wreckage on the island of Reunion (See the earlier post, "Who Needs International Expertise?"), cause us to visit the border of Ukraine and Russia and to contemplate the vastness of the Indian Ocean.

     Children can look at maps to pick out shapes (See the earlier post, "How the World Shapes Up."), to find where people practice different religions (See the earlier post, "Respect the Faith."), to have an international scavenger hunt (See the earlier post, "Games Children Play."), and to study currents, mountain elevations, count time zones, and plan where they want to visit and work (See the earlier posts, "See the World" and "What Do You Want to Be?"). Also, check out Maps4Kids.com, which has a wide variety of activities associated with maps.
 

I Made This Myself

"Don't you love it when a plan comes together?" That saying John "Hannibal" Smith used to use on the "A Team" television show expresses the feeling I got when I read about the MakerMovement that encourages children to build what they imagine and crowdfunding by a Kickstarter, RocketHub, or Kiva. Since there is a way for anyone to find investors, anyone in the world who has an idea for a new app, 3D printer creation, programmable device, or, what one visionary has proposed, an automated factory on the moon, now has an opportunity to raise the money needed to make an innovation a reality.


     In an interview conducted by station KQED (kqed.org) in Northern California, Dale Dougherty, CEO of MakerMedia and editor of MAKE magazine, told how he began promoting hands-on learning at a Maker Faire in 2006 and later at MakerCon conferences. He is devoted to the idea that tinkering with the tools and materials for making things can be fun.

     Project Zero, a research study developed by Harvard's Graduate School of Education and tested by classroom teachers in Oakland, California, aims to inspire students to be curious about the designs that make things and nature work. When students looked at a pencil and a snail, they began to ask questions, not only about how they worked, but also what kind of designs could help them do a better job. Some youngsters even suggested ways to make life better for the snail. And there was a crossover to discover the new words needed to describe a design process and to defend ideas of how things are made.

     Since schools can't do everything, there is a greater role for parents, childcare, Boys and Girls Clubs, 4H, community centers, church youth groups, and scouting programs. They can provide the things kids need to help them create, perform, and learn: blocks, LEGOs, Tinker Toys, Erector Sets, computers, 3D printers, pottery wheels, found objects, cameras, watercolors, easels, musical instruments, a stage, and garden plots. It's rather expensive, but, for $16.95 per month, tinker.kiwicrate,com/inside-a-crate will send students, 9 to 16+, a hands-on STEM (science, engineering, technology) inspired maker project.

    Making all kinds of materials available to students helps them discover new possibilities. That's reason enough to provide a place to cook, bake, sew, make jewelry, and knit. Inspired by puffy sourdough and flatter pizza dough an artist combined them and twisted, carved, and painted them into what became an octopus sculpture. A businessman inspired children to create sculptures out of the shredded documents he dumped into a pail of water.

     According to experiments at Hanyang Cyber University in South Korea, involving the body in learning also helps improve memory needed in any subject. When hands manipulate objects, for example, the brain has more cues to remember what was learned. When my mother was a math consultant for the Chicago Public School System, the first thing she did when she visited a school was observe what manipulative devices were in use. If she saw few or none, her next step was to try to find the supply room or closet where they were kept, because she knew that after the Russians sent up Sputnik, the federal government funded purchases of many such devices to aid learning math. I remember seeing one of my favorites, a scale that allowed kids to balance numbers on one side with those on the other. A big "5", for example, would equal a little "2" and "3" on the other side.

      Earlier blog posts have related ideas. See "Transform Spaces into Creative Places," "Back to the Land," "Tin Can Art," and "Global Drawing Power."

Newly-discovered German Fairytales Teach and Challenge

Although the stories of Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin are best known because of Walt Disney and the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, different versions of these tales were told throughout Europe. What makes the 500 newly found fairytales collected by 19th century historian, Franz Xaver von Schonwerth, different from the way they are interpreted today is his faithful recording of the way stories farmers, servants, and other country folk passed them on by word of mouth.

     In Oberpfalz, Bavaria, where von Schonwerth collected and published local myths, legends, and fairytales in 1857-1859, cultural curator Erika Eichenseer has published a collection of his works. In Munich, Dan Szabo is now translating them into English.

     Eichenseer sees fairytales as a treasure of ancient knowledge and wisdom, a way of helping youngsters understand how virtue, prudence, and courage can overcome dangers and challenges. We might see tales involving evil witches, magic animals, spells, and brave princes as helping children think outside the box. When a maiden is threatened by a witch, for example, she transforms herself into a pond. The witch drinks the pond dry, and the girl kills the witch by cutting herself out of the witch's stomach.

     Using a prince, a bear, and a witch, The Turnip Princess seems to stress the importance of following instructions. When the prince did as the bear directed, pulled a rusty nail out of a cave's wall, and placed it under a turnip, the witch turned into a beautiful, kind girl who married the prince.

     When Szabo's English translations are completed, kids and Disney will have new material to interpret. Meanwhile, children can ask grandparents to tell them the stories they heard when they were youngsters.When I taught, I was surprised to learn that many students had not heard of a Greek slave's Aesop's Fables,  recorded by the 14th century monk, Maximus Planudes. Maybe grandparents will introduce their grandchildren to "The Fox and the Grapes" and "The Lion and the Mouse."