Comfort zone

Comfort zone, a place where we all feel safe. Whether is in your personal, professional or academic life, we always want to stay inside that “bubble” where nothing can do us harm.

Once, at my Teacher Training College, a teacher told my classmates and I that one of her goals was to get us outside our safe zone. Of course I was scared when I heard that because I didn’t know what to expect, but here I am stepping out of my comfort zone and sharing my thoughts and experiences.

Even though I haven’t had too many experiences teaching at schools because I’m just a student, I remember one of the previous years when I had an assignment that was scary for me. I had to plan two activities for a group of students, who were going to spend a day at a picnic in a non-formal environment, with the idea of entertain them as well as teaching them. Along with two of my classmates, we came up with the idea of the “Hamburgame” and “Chinese Whispers”.

For the first game, we settled two stations with one hamburger, made of foam, on each station. We told the kids a list of ingredients to prepare the hamburger and they had to run, in two different groups, and do it; the faster and more accurate one, was the winner.

For the later one, instead of saying the words in isolation to the kids for them to pass around to their friends, we told them simple sentences. The first kid, at the end of the row, to say the sentence correctly and out loud was the winner.

To be honest with you, I didn’t want to do it. I thought that I wasn’t going to do very well with kids around 10 years old, but I did! Let’s say that that is my comfort zone, teaching to young adults. If I learned something about that experience is that I can do it, and even though there are still some fears hovering around regarding how to teach children from primary school, I believe I need to get out of my “bubble” more often. Everyone does.

We need to take more risks, more chances. But the thing is, sometimes we are afraid that we might get hurt or disappointed because the activities we'd prepared didn’t work or the students didn’t engaged as we thought they would. But that’s the thing, we never know until we try. And if that happens, we can always change something about the activity and try again and again until we are satisfied. So, let’s give it a shot and pop the bubble.