Jeni as a Bangladeshi

You know,

As I help to create curriculum and coordinate training programs for the students here in Bangladesh, I am often reminded of my teaching experience at Hope Chinese School. Of dragging myself out of bed on Sundays mornings to my 9AM classes, pulling late nights on Saturdays (okay, sometimes due to procrastination) correcting homework and quizzes, and eating in the car while rushing from one campus to the other (and *ALWAYS* being late for my afternoon classes).

And as I think back on all of it now, it strikes me how much of my out-of-class college experience was from the time spent with my students (…and their homework). It’s also interesting how my perceptions about teaching evolved through those years. What began as a chore gradually turned into a personal, emotional responsibility - the highlight of my weekend was knowing that my students enjoyed class that day, and I took offense when I heard anything negative said about them (the adult Chinese community loves to gossip - it’s inevitable).

During those years, teaching for me had never been about drilling my students on mathematical formula or improving their test scores. They were already over-achieving and smart and under academic pressure from growing up in Chinese-American households. I didn’t see it my job to traumatize them more (well, academically). I wanted to make sure that the students also saw the other side of a classroom - that teamwork is important even in math, that it’s okay to challenge their teachers, that their hour with me is not to memorize the pythagorean theorem, but to learn how to think.

It’s been years since those days where my mornings began with quieting down hyperactive boys and reassuring female students that there’s no such thing as cooties. But thanks to technology (a.k.a. Facebook), I am updated as some of them graduate from school, travel around the country/world, or repeatedly list themselves as single-unsingle-single-unsingle, etc. As we all grow and mature (and get old), I hope that they, like myself, have kept a part of those crazy classroom days with them.

So this entry is dedicated as a thanks to my old students. Thank you:

• for being patient while I try to explain extremely dry material - believe me, I didn’t enjoy it either,
• for participating in our weekly "challenge questions" (such as "good-guys bad-guys"! It was hard explaining to your parents why there were shreds of paper with smiley/angry faces all over the room),
• for being on time even though I’m always late (but I always had an excuse, didn’t I?),
• for politely laughing at my corny, corny jokes…
• and then letting me make fun of you in return.
• for understanding that verbal class is not about early vocabulary; it’s about playing games and making huge posters (I still have them with me!)
• [and for those who came to my little Summer Camps] for going along with all the ‘lesson plans’, when it was clear that we were all there to have fun and eat bad food.

[This is unrelated to my project]

Today’s the 50th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a book that, in a nutshell, pretty much changed much of my life in the past few years. 

For fellow Ayn Rand fans… This is John Galt Speaking.

My copy of the book, complete with highlights, scribbles, and dog-eared pages, goes with me where ever I go (and yes, I also took it with me to Bangladesh). To celebrate this day, here are some selected quotes from this incredible book.

"An inventor is a man who asks ‘Why?’ of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind."

"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

"She was twelve years old when she told Eddie Willers that she would run the railroad when they grew up. She was fifteen when it occurred to her for the first time that women did not run railroads and that people might object. To hell with that, she thought—and never worried about it again."

"For centuries, the battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and that the good is to live it."

"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed? …We want them broken… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt."

"It is not advisable, James, to venture unsolicited opinions. You should spare yourself the embarrassing discovery of their exact value to your listener."

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

"An error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error."

"Love is our response to our highest values"

As part of GSM’s 20th year anniversary, the association hired TelecomTV to go around the world filming 20 countries being changed by mobile technology; the documentary will be previewed at the GSM Mobile Asia Congress next month in Macau, and premiered at several film festivals next year. Today was a blur of logistics as we guided a camera crew to film areas of my project.

Now that I am properly situated back at my desk, I thought this would be a good time to give an update on the absolute highlight of my time here - my project

The main challenge is to figure out how to link the development of industry skills to a longterm overall strategy of alleviating poverty. It’s a complex topic, but we’ve made incredible progress. Perhaps the best way to explain our model in a nutshell is as follows (yes, I will forever be a Visio dork):

The advantages here are that companies save recruitment and post-entry training costs, and the students are guaranteed employment. But the even COOLER part is that we’ve been able to turn CompanyABC into huge telecom players such as Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent, and SchoolDEF is a nonprofit technical school created especially for underprivileged youth - the school is unique in that its focus is not to develop scholars, but to provide a means for these urban slum children to get the employment to support their families (No, child labor here is not a controversy. It is simply reality).

I love this project from two main angles -

1. It is sustainable. I’m not a fan of companies going out of their way to ‘give’ and ‘donate’ money with the intention of making any kind of big social change. Companies exist because they make profit, not because they are charity houses. To guarantee that a social investment actually lasts beyond its marketing appeal, corporate initiatives to address social issues should first and foremost guarantee that the company is either generating income, or reducing costs. Period.
2. I’m a huge fan of children’s education - I spent years teaching children on weekends at Hope Chinese School, did an entire undergrad thesis on underprivileged youth education (which I unfortunately couldn’t be there to finish, but my team did an incredible job!), and plan to invest in schools in developing countries when I’m old, retired, and rich.

I love it. 

And I love the children. Being there and interacting with these kids is amazing. Seeing how eager they are to learn, despite their socio-economic status, despite their full-time jobs (they have to work to support their families)  makes me somewhat embarrased about our own attitudes towards education back home. They literally drag me around to demonstrate how to assemble a TV, make a booklet, fix a car engine, or sew dress shirts. I try to communicate with them using the two Bengali phrases I know, and they respond back in broken English. But I think we get along just fine. And today, one of the girls asked me for an autograph, and said something about wanting to be like me when they they grow up. I smiled, but with a lump in my throat.