Stop! School ahead

On Tuesday October 10th, I went to a nearby middle/high school named “Ramy Helal” I had my group with me and we spent around three hours with a group of children ranging from grade 7 to 10. Our group was “Nagib Magfouz” for some reason (Maybe because it was in the library) and we had quite a diverse group of personalities and ambitions!

we had two boys and ten girls, Ragi and Salah, were the introverts/nerdy guys who one of them wanted to be a heart surgeon n and the other an IT administrator.

one girl that stood out to me was Sarah, she likes insects, staying alone in the woods, she thinks we are all going to die in a couple of years and she looks like Wednesday.

The other girls were also quite diverse in their ambition, we had the sports girl, the fashion design, the one that wants to be an astronaut. However, I immediately knew it was a setup, when eight out of the ten girls and one of the boys told me that their favorite subject is MATH! In what school, and in which class does the majority love math? 😂 what is happening to the future generation?

before going to the trip I thought for some reason that the children will be naughty and hard to work with, which turned to be false. Aliaa had nametags ready for the children and she also printed some of the hobbies like art, reading, sports …etc for the activity that we are going to play. the plan was to get to know the children more, know their names, hobbies, favorite subjects, and then play with them a game (wild tea) then we talk with them about the topics ( AI, Fake news, and bias and discrimination). we divided the roles organically for example Aliaa, wrote the name tags, and prepared question for the wild tea and conducted the game, I spoke with the children about AI and its relation to fake news and bias -it turned to be a lecture for some reason- Ali was our joker, he made multiple discussions with the kids during the hobbies activity, he played with the children in the wild tea, he shared ideas about his experience during grade 12 which was the most asked question.

Something I learned from the visit is that children are way way more open through social media, sometimes even more than me, or maybe because I don’t have TikTok.