Teaching from ignorance

Today, I was assigned the duty of tutoring one of the Burmese locals that works for the company and also teaching a class of three women who have been going through a series of 4 classes known as Opportunity Now!'s Business Explorer classes.  First off, I worked with a guy named Deerum in a private tutoring session as we tried to address the first of his two objectives that he had shared with me yesterday.  

I had spent a good chunk of the afternoon yesterday developing a lesson plan for him as I felt really ignorant on the subject so I knew it would take some time to properly prepare.  Not to mention that it was supposed to take a full 2 hours straight of our time.  You can get through a ton of material in 2 hours via one on one tutoring sessions.  His first objective that he wants to address with me is to improve his English writing - both for personal use as well as business use, with the emphasis being placed on business English since he will use that more in his everyday use for the organization.  When I had finished typing out my plans, I had 5 pages worth of plans.  

By the time we finished, we had spent the entire 2 hours doing the lesson I had developed.  Deerum is a wonderful student but as I am finding here, I found in Haiti, and is rampant in America due to standardized tests that are all multiple choice instead of asking the students to produce and create something, he had a difficult time applying what he had learned when I was teaching him and he was busily taking notes. After some guidance and encouragement he did fine though, so I have a feeling we'll be able to go pretty far in 8 short hours.  I even gave him homework, would I be considered a real teacher if I didn't?  hahaha

In my plans and the majority of what I had him copy down as notes, were 17 different types of business writing that I came up with off the top of my head.  Not too bad considering this is my first week in the business world, right?!  Actually, I had read through quite a bit of the Opportunities' Now core curriculum so I was more familiar with what types of documents were needed to start a business.  A few of them I did pick up however during meetings and conversations with some of the organization's leaders.  As I mentioned before, we got through a ton of material and then applied what we had learned and tried to create some of the documents that we had discussed.  I was reminded of how clearly a teacher must communicate exactly what they expect.  In Deerum's case I had asked him to write a paragraph for something and he wrote bullet points with numbers.  Turns out he didn't know what the word paragraph meant; which I should've asked him before assigning him the task.  Lesson learned though fairly quickly and we put it into paragraph form rather quickly with him doing the work and me editing.

That tutoring session lasted from 10-12 this morning.  After an hour lunch break, I was asked to teach the Business Explorer's 4th class which focused on 'Managing Your Business.'  I found this to be hugely ironic since my personal management of time in particular is quite deplorable and not something to be emulated.  However, as the old saying goes, "Do as I say, not as I do."  Ryan was gracious enough to go over the 6 slide powerpoint presentation that I was somehow miraculously supposed to stretch into 3 hours.  Again, I went bell to bell as they say.  I used the entire 3 hours, well more like 2 hours and 45 minutes because we wanted to wait for everyone to arrive, Burmese usually arrive about 15 minutes late Deerum had informed me earlier.

There are three things to manage when opening a new business - time, resources, and people.  As it turns out, these are all limited things and hence the need to manage them.  Ryan emphasized to me the importance of prioritizing tasks within each of these three areas and also the need to delegate different ones to different people.  As a result, i also emphasized the importance of prioritizing things and delegation during the presentation today.  I took several notes during Ryan's brief overview of the slide show and was able to expand on the notes into a halfway decent lesson considering I had just learned about the stuff earlier in the same day.  I also had the three women inform me of what they had learned in their first 3 sessions so they could review the material as well as so I could be informed of what else they had already learned and use that as a general starting point to transition into my lesson.

The three young hopefully soon to be entrepreneurial women did a great job at reviewing the material from the previous three lessons and that provided me with a great starting point to launch into my lesson for today.  After teaching straight through for probably an hour and a half or two, it was time to put these girls to the test.  Don't worry, not a multiple choice-test as I hate those things and have yet to see them as being of any real value in the working world of today's global marketplace.  No, I had these three bright-eyed and eager to be entrepreneurs present their business plans to me and the rest of the class and act as if they were trying to pitch the idea to me in order to secure a loan.  I gave them probably about 5 minutes to write down ideas for their pitch and then said as each one presented their ideas, we would listen carefully and offer constructive criticism afterwards.  I made sure to say it would have to be constructive and respectful, not that it would be an issue anyways but I assured them hearing criticism is difficult for anyone to handle but that it was a necessary part of the learning process and refining process to get them ready to present to a bank or other lender.

The girls did a fabulous job and I followed up their presentation with questions that I thought a lender might ask them after their business presentations.  Why should they lend to you as opposed to the competition?  What makes your business unique?  Why will it succeed?  What kind of experience do you have in the field? I also encouraged them to dream big in order to show the bank or lender that they were especially passionate about their business and wanted to grow and expand quickly.  For instance, one girl wants to open a private kindergarten center in Yangon.  I asked her to brainstorm what she would do if her student population outgrew the facility that she was renting?  Would she build a building?  Would she rent property nearby to open another center?  Would she split the population among two different locations?  How close would they be to one another?  How are you going to manage both places since you can only be physically present in one of them at a time?  She was really quick on her feet as were all of them and really impressed me.

I had a wonderful time teaching today.  This is what I love, teaching practical skills that people will use.  In kindergarten you teach the basics which are necessary to everyday living.  The same goes for the classes here; we are teaching business basics that students can then use to launch their own businesses.  I have to believe that when my dad reads this he will grin with a big ol' smile as he has always applauded things that are actually practical and necessary to a job as opposed to just theory.  Ryan, my friend and the CEO of the organization thinks a lot like my dad.  When brainstorming about where to find teachers for the entrepreneurship classes, I suggested perhaps teachers from a local business school may be of some aid.  Without hesitation Ryan informed me that they were mostly all academic theory with little to no experience in the real world of business and were therefore useless to our students.  We need people, he went on to inform me, that have a ton of on the ground experience and can teach from that experience with real world examples as opposed to mere theoreticians.  For a moment I thought it was coming straight out of my dad's mouth, as if my dad had lent Ryan an earpiece and was telling him what to say.