How Janusz Korczak Inspired My Robotics Teaching Journey: A Story of Innovation and Impact

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“Children are not the people of tomorrow. But, they’re the people of today.” – Janusz Korczak, the man who wrote books like How to love a child, said.

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It’s been my dream for years to do something to consciously create a better future where every one of us is excited about our own potential. My goal as a coach is to empower children to lead their journey of discovering their true potential. My challenge to everyone is that they aspire for their personal best and leave a legacy of their work through their contributions to mankind.

What I love about Robotics is that there’s instant engagement from children. As they’re having fun while driving their virtual 3D robots using block coding, it makes it easy to teach grade students important concepts like AI, Data Science, Coding, Design, Engineering among other things.

I believe that my job isn’t even teaching children the actual semantics and the syntax. It’s about showing them that we believe in their ability to solve any challenge at hand.

Our curriculum ensures that children understand the real world application of the solution they’ve just created. And most importantly, they realize the ethics and the potential for a positive impact of their contributions.

In class, I set expectations early on that children are responsible for their projects and homework. This improves self-advocacy and focus management, two important life skills, that help kids develop the confidence to navigate real life challenges on their own.

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Of all the people that have influenced my journey, Janusz Korczak, an educator and a children’s author, is somewhere at the top. Below, he describes in his works, how we lose our child like wonder and start worrying about the problems of being a grown up.

Here’s an excerpt from an unknown source that I had saved from sometime ago. (If you know the source, please mention in the comment section, thank you.)

Doctor And His Children

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Janusz Korczak was a well-known doctor and author who ran a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw from 1911 to 1942. Korczak and his staff stayed with their children even as German authorities deported them all to their deaths at Treblinka in August 1942. (Source: The Holocaust Encyclopedia)

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“Here expresses perfectly the conversational conundrum between children and ourselves. By the time a child can articulate his or her deep-felt thoughts he no longer is a child, and we have at once lost exact touch with our own past and with the inhabitants of our future.

Fortunately, two writers of this century have been able, by the grace of their literary art, to bring the living world of the child to light.

In A la recherche du temps perdu (I9I8), Marcel Proust brought back, in vivid and lasting detail, the small feelings of childhood remembrance. But he did it with analytical elegance, so the reader always knows Proust is big recalling when he was little.

Korczak’s When I Am Little Again (I925) accomplishes something much more difficult. With Korczak you know he is little recalling when he was big.

Both writers lift the scabs of time, but of the two Korczak is the more revealing and the more healing. Korczak limns the searing humiliation of childhood through simple exchanges such as this one: “Once I asked,-’Mama, is a red ribbon better for a dog or a cat?’ And Mama answered, ‘You tore your pants again today.’”

But Korczak can also be lyrical; “When I was a grownup and I saw snow, I already anticipated the slush that would follow. I felt the damp overshoes, and wondered whether there would be enough coal for the winter.

And joy was there, but sprinkled somehow with ashes, dusty and grey. But now I feel only that white, transparent and blinding joy. Why? For no reason at all: because it snowed!… There are thousands of little sparks inside me. It’s as if someone sprinkled diamond dust in my soul and along the ground. The dust was sown and now diamond trees will spring up and a wondrous fairy tale will be born.”

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Doctor And His Children Image Source: International Fellowship Of Christians And Jews
Janusz Korczak Image Source: CBC News

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Children are not vessels to be filled, but lamps to be lit. ~ Swami Chinmayananda

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True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care-with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. ~ David Foster Wallace