During one of our mentor session, I and my partner, Sanah, went to a Grade 5 classroom and have a mini session introducing IFP with them. It was to bring in the idea of positive and negative peace, identifying the conflicts and different ways to solve the conflicts. First of all, I myself really did enjoy it. I like their enthusiasms, their willingness to participate in discussions and raise up their hands to voice in their opinions. It makes me feel that we actually have done a good job. So, this is not necessarily an informative and hopefully interesting session to them, but to us as well. Hence, it’s a 2-way beneficial session.

(Out of topic: No offence, but what I had in mind already for some times is that these small kids tend to be more passionate about different activities than teenagers. They are at the age to want and try new things. For example, if 2 same activities are done during lunchtime, I’ve observed that there will be more people during middle school lunchtime than the high school one. There might be several factors to this. I don’t know. I just want to put it out there.)

Anyway, I can see that they are very eager and they do know how to approach these conflicts. We are not there to tell them anything, they know how to approach it themselves. They also realize that in the real situation itself, it would be not as easy, but it’s worth to keep in mind. We are just there to remind them that they could this or that that they’ve discussed among themselves.

Talking about my skills in the session itself, I think my strength is that I can control the crowd really well. I spoke in a clear manner, sometimes crack a joke, but also serious when needed, I know my audience well, and how to make the most out of it. And one of my weakness in this session is that at one time when some group is speaking, the rest of the group in the far back corner might not really be listening. However, I can’t just cut in and move everyone to the front and make sure that they listen to each other because I also realize that we don’t have much time left. Hence, I just left it to go with the flow for the last 1 or 2 minutes. I think I should have calculated in my head, in the beginning, and bring everyone to discuss this together at the start.

Overall, I think it was a very triumphant experience which was a good start to my day and was definitely a good start to prepare for the conference.