I recently posted an update on Bonjour, which was a way of making something I'd been wanting to do public! I shared it as a community post, and I also wanted to keep a record of it here.
If more young people see it and say they're interested, then, just as I wrote in the post, I'll bring out my not-so-consistent extrovert side and actively reach out to them!
So, here's the post:
Hi everyone! 👋 I'm Helia. I've been on Bonjour for a long time, and this is only my third post. I hope you'll start to recognize me!
This next part is a little (keep reading and you'll find out... it's more than just a ‘little’ 🥺) long. Thank you for taking the time to read it!
(I really have some nerve 👻 I still haven't learned the TLDR strategy... But this is also how I write and how I let my thinking show 👻
Maybe because of my first post, some people added me to their blogrolls. Even more surprising, some of them were young people born in 2009!
That makes me think of my little niece, who's around the same age. When I went home at the beginning of the year and saw my little nephew, I realized he was born after 2020. The post-2020 generation... I guess I'm someone who, in that big family, has spent time with people born after 1995, in the 2000s, the 2010s, and the 2020s as they grew up! Every summer and every time I went home, I would play with them (different kids at different times)!
After I left school (I hadn't actually graduated yet, but the pandemic kept me from going back, so I officially started working before I even got my diploma), my first job was at a startup school. I followed the team from when the school didn't even have a place of its own yet (we borrowed another school's campus when classes started that year), through moving into our own campus, and then to the school beginning to take shape... My role changed during that time, but I still had the chance to watch up close, and over a longer stretch of time, how K–12 students spent their school days (well, not quite K–12, since I didn't actually work with eighth or ninth graders back then).
The most creative part of that job, to me, was that we could design our own electives outside the regular subjects. At the time, I brought podcast production into the curriculum and made podcasts with the kids.
My thinking then was that I had heard many adult voices, especially in podcasts, but rarely heard kids express themselves. Quite a few kids would run to the office to chat with me as soon as class ended... Sometimes they would all chatter at once and I wouldn't even know who to answer first. At moments like that, part of me would be angrily thinking, why hasn't that bell rung yet! If this keeps up, I'm going to go fix it. I'm not joking: part of one of my early jobs was setting up the school bells.
But all those conversations happened in private and disappeared as quickly as they happened. They might stay in my memory and the kids' memories, but that wasn't enough to create a space where more of their peers could see, or believe, that teacher-student relationships like this existed elsewhere. So I wanted to create that kind of space, to help more of the kids around me realize, ‘My voice is also worth hearing, and should be heard, by adults’—really heard!
Later, I went on Xiaoyuzhou and found a few podcast makers who were still in high school at the time (in the second half of 2021, I saw very few high school hosts), and shared their work as examples with my students.
I even took the initiative to DM student creators on Bilibili and invite them to online interviews... Looking back now, that really was quite presumptuous. 🥺
And, unexpectedly, they either declined, didn't see the message, or just didn't respond... I say ‘unexpectedly’ because I had overestimated what people imagined when they heard ‘teacher.’ I could sense a little of that in the rejection replies.
Recently, some students from that first group got back in touch with me. One reached out because they were having some trouble using AI. Another reached out because graduation season was coming up... As we talked, I realized: Oh! These students were telling me about some of the difficulties and questions they had run into during the three years since leaving their high school and entering college. Could the skills or ways of thinking involved be designed into high school courses earlier? Their old school has tried similar things before, but did it really do enough?
So I shared some of these thoughts with someone I worked with back then, who is still at the school now, hoping the school could build a feedback loop that would then feed back into its educational practice. That would be wonderful! Because I think that while we emphasize that people should become lifelong learners, an organization itself can also be seen as its own entity—one that can become a lifelong-learning organization.
As I wrote in an article on my WeChat public account a few days ago:
‘A school is made up not only of people, but also of facilities and equipment. But whether they are people, facilities, or equipment, they are all part of the environment or space—and together, this setting determines how the people living in it influence and even shape one another.
Facilities and equipment can't decide how they exist. That means we, as people, are the biggest variable within it—or, you could say, the part that can be changed.’
Especially that last sentence! Even though I'm no longer at the school, I still want to be that kind of ‘variable,’ or the part that can be changed.
This brings me back to why I chose to write such a long post today: I want to continue the experiment I started before, and invite some young people to chat. Online is fine. It will most likely feel like a casual interview.
As an experimental project that asks other people to spend their time and energy, whether passively or actively, I don't really have anything to give them in return. What I can promise for now is that after every conversation, I'll put together a written transcript or an audio file as a record. Once the other person has confirmed it, I'll share it publicly too.
Okay! We've finally reached the specifics of the plan! I mentioned an ‘experimental project’ and a ‘casual interview’ above. More specifically, during the conversation, I want to learn what you'd like to be called, what you're curious about, what you're thinking about, what you're doing, what you've done, what problems you've run into and how you solved them, what still needs to be solved, what little skill-like tricks you have... Things along those lines. I hope the conversation can show the person I'm talking with as they are. A person is the sum of their context. I hope I can record part of their context, let all those contexts gather together, and see what possibilities they might bring in the future!
One more thing I should add: when it comes to my personal interests, my energy comes in bursts. When my energy is high, outside of working hours, eating, drinking, going to the bathroom, and sleeping are the things I hate most. When my energy is low, outside of working hours, I just want to be alone and don't want anyone to bother me. So this will be a project with ‘no expected start and no set end.’ If no one responds, I'll most likely follow my own pace. Slowly, slowly (and I really do mean ‘slowly’)!
So, I look forward to our lives crossing paths a little. Even more, I look forward to recording part of your context up to a certain moment! If you think someone might be interested in my experimental project, or if there's someone you're curious about, please recommend them to me. I'll bring out my not-so-consistent extrovert side and reach out to them! But please don't give a nobody like me too difficult a challenge 🥺
Of course! It would also be very cool if someone better suited to this started something like it. And if someone already has, please tell me!
P.S. I think: 1) if you've read this far, you can probably get at least a tiny sense of this experimental project's character. As I understand it, it should be a state in between, where ‘unfinished’ and ‘ongoing’ exist together! 2) ‘Kids’ doesn't only mean little kids. It can also include grown-up kids! For example, my boss at my previous company called me a ‘kid,’ and I'm also a grown-up friend to little kids.
That's all.
That's the end of the post. Wasn't it really long! I think so too! It almost feels like I took it a little too seriously! (No! No! No! Don't think that!)
Anyway, while looking through my list on Bilibili recently, I found these little interactions with students and had some feelings about them.
Then I went to their profile and found that they're now studying something they love and doing things they love too. Really! I'm so, so happy for them!
And below is an experiment I initiated to encourage everyone to make podcasts. It was also the first time I'd ever made a podcast from zero to one. Very rough! And because our schedules at school overlapped so little, we ended up with pitifully few recordings...
I've rambled too much. I need to wrap this up quickly!
One very, very last thing, about the cover image, which is the whole image below. I came across it last year while wandering around an unknown neighborhood in Bangkok. It was on the outer wall of a kindergarten (yes, there really was a kindergarten on the other side of the wall!). I was deeply struck the moment I saw it, so I took a photo.
But what exactly is the ‘right thing’?
The answers each of us gives probably carry our own positions, biases, and values.
So let's set out first. We'll always meet people along the way.
Thank you again for reading. That's all.
