by Isaac Pritt
A year and a half ago we I was at one of our ECCO seminar nights where we often dive into education issues or explore the outer rims of our field. During this night, we watched a TED Talk titled, "World Peace and Other Accomplishments of the 4th Grade," a title that obviously peaked my interest. In that, we learned about about an amazing classroom activity called the World Peace Game where children had the chance to solve the world's issues within the walls of their classroom.
After seeing the TED Talk, I had to learn more! I went to Vrooman and he told me that there were in fact Master classes where you could learn and become a certified facilitator of the game, the only issue being that to go would cost $1,500. After talking a little more, Vrooman found a grant that we could apply for and we wrote an application together and won $5,000 for the project! After this awesome accomplishment, we chose three other stellar members of ECCO to come with me to the Friends School of Baltimore to take the Master classes.
Upon getting to the classes, we met the creator of the game, which I could only describe as the Dalai Lama of education! He greeted us all with saying, "Here is my legacy!" and the whole week he taught us such amazing educational concepts and practices that changed my view of education forever. Throughout our time, we trained and learned alongside veteran educators from everywhere across the country who were just as amazing and treated us as equals. We left to our hotel everyday with our minds blown about everything that we experienced and could never stop talking about the deep implications that it had for the future of our lives as well as those that we will teach one day.
The craziest and best part was at the end of the week where we were saying goodbyes and sharing our capstone projects and for some reason I just started crying about the wonders of education and children, which in turn caused everyone to cry and we said our goodbyes to all of the friends that we made. I'll never forget that week and I doubt I'll experience anything like it again.
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