I don’t mean to describe the rough condition the Dandelion students are living in, but without a basic understanding of their life and environment, we won’t be able to recognize how amazing and adorable they are. Dandelion is a boarding school: students eat and live on campus, which was once an abandoned factory. Dormitory rooms are unsanitary and cramped, each accommodating 14 students. Students at Dandelion don’t have cellphones; they also can’t watch TV or surf the Internet on weekdays. Yet the lack of free time and exposure to modern information has not stopped them from keeping up with the contemporary pop culture. As rapidly as the culture and trend have been evolving, the students manage to catch up with basically everything that is considered ‘new’. Admittedly, before arriving on Dandelion campus, I imagined that students might have a narrow perspective due to their limited access to diverse resources. However, I started to notice their usage of popular internet language(元芳你怎么看,贱人就是矫情, etc) in their everyday conversation from the first day we arrived here. What’s more, I met Tom, an eighth grade boy at Dandelion School who is surprisingly interested in computer science. Over the past couple years, he has learnt HTML and EPLSW(basic coding languages) by himself. He also told me that he wants to learn C++, which is a language that I haven’t learned much as a rising junior majoring in computer science. It is purely amazing how he has accumulated such large amount of knowledge of computer science and web development. During our conversation, Tom told me about his past experience and his family. They came to Beijing from Hebei. His mom is a housewife. He has an older sister, who is already working with his father to support the family. Tom also told me about his experience with a previous Harvard volunteer at Dandelion. Although the volunteer taught Tom coding for a few weeks, he never replied Tom’s e-mail after he left Dandelion. I classified this as a typical poverty tourism behavior. None of the dandelion students seemed to be really excited about our arrival, which indicates that they have become tired seeing all the volunteers come and go. Therefore it is on us to make ourselves different. Tom’s focus and dream make me wonder how I can help him better, both when I am here and after I leave the school. I realized that what matters most is not the vocabularies or grammars we teach the students, but the impact that we have on them. Throughout interactions with the students, we need to be more motivating, give them hope, and inspire them to explore the new world. |