Writing Olympics

Another project Sam and I were involved in lately was the Writing Olympics. It's a Peace Corps project that was started in Georgia by a PCV in 2004, which has grown to include students in 11 Peace Corps countries. The competition is open to students in 6th-12th grades and essays are judged on creativity and content, not spelling and grammar. The goal is to encourage students to take some risks and chances and learn to think creatively. I don't think it's an overstatement to say that creative thinking and originality are rarely taught here and generally aren't highly valued skills among students.

More often in classes here, the emphasis is on getting the right answer, memorizing the grammar rules and not ever making mistakes. But unless you hope to have a future as a textbook, you need to make some mistakes in the learning process and open yourself up to express original thoughts. Creativity, which seems to be taught to Americans from just about their earliest days, isn't part of the learning process here most of the time. It's like pulling teeth to get my students to write sentences or stories unless I give them explicit directions on the topic and how the story/sentence should be constructed and what verbs and nouns to use in it (and this isn't just a lost-in-translation thing; even asking students to make up sentences in Russian can be a real challenge). One fellow PCV told me about how she asked her students to draw pictures so then they could practice describing them using all the adjectives they had just learned. None of them would put marker to paper until she gave more specific instructions about what to draw. Little kids! With markers and paper, told to draw pictures, but couldn't unless told what to draw!

At any rate, the Writing Olympics is one effort to combat rote memorization and encourage some new thinking. Students have one hour to write an essay on one of three topics chosen for each class. We only tell them the topic on the day of the competition (so they can't prepare in advance), and they are not allowed to use any dictionaries, textbooks, online translators or outside assistance. Just them, with a paper and a pen, writing their thoughts on one of the topics provided.

Sam and I hosted a full day of Writing Olympics fun one Saturday at the end of March in Akhalkalaki. We had a few English teachers from town come to help us (we were allowed to translate the prompts into the kids' native languages, so these counterparts were key for helping us translate into Armenian). We had 54 total kids, from 6th-11th grades, participate from 3 of Akhalkalaki's 5 schools.

Here are the prompts students received:
6th Form
- How would your life be different if you were the opposite gender?
- Which would you rather be: a bird or a fish? Why?
- If you were an architect how would you design the perfect school?
7th Form
- How would the world be different if everyone spoke the same language?
- If you could choose to be an ocean, a river, a lake or a stream, which would you choose to be and why?
- What do you think your village/town will look like in 300 years?
8th Form
- If you could have any superpower, what would it be and how would you use it?
- What one sound do you wish you could eliminate from the world, and why?
- Describe your favorite photograph, and why it is your favorite.
9th Form
- What makes a country a country, other than language, geography, and government?
- What is a smell that reminds you of a specific memory, and what is that memory?
- If you could fill the night sky with something other than stars and planets, what would it be and why?
10th Form
- What is the funniest thing you have ever done or that has ever happened to you?
- If you could design a new flag for your country what would it look like?
- What does a caged bird think about all day?
11th Form
- What was God like as a child?
- Whom do you respect most and why?
- Describe the personalities of different rooms in a house (bedroom, bathroom, etc.).
12th Form
- If hunger were a painting what would it look like?
- Describe the perfect marriage.
- If you could start any business what would it be?

Last weekend we went to Tbilisi to judge the essays from all over Georgia. We received almost 1500 total essays, so the 20 or so volunteers that showed up to judge had a full day of reading. It was a lot of fun-intentional and unintentional bits of humor from essays were shared around (one kid's essay was an ode to Jon Bon Jovi, the greatest man ever to live). The majority of essays were fairly uninspired; most students wrote sentences that they likely memorized from their textbooks at one time or another. They found it difficult to imagine "what if" and often wrote that they couldn't be a bird, because that wasn't possible or that a country is only a country because of language and government or something similar. The standout essays were truly standouts. Some kids were incredibly talented and wrote such fantastic tales that, indeed, spelling mistakes and grammar errors were completely unnoticeable. The kids who won (we chose 1st, 2nd and 3rd places in each grade, first from each region of Georgia, then from those winners, we chose national winners) will get some pretty nice prizes, but hopefully each child that participated will have learned at least a little bit about thinking differently.