2013
I looked at her, mildly amused. Messy haired, with a mind and will too big for her body, she was sparking. I could hear her "Prof, we need to do for the kids a huge project!"
She was a student at natural sciences, President of the County Council of Pupils Sibiu, oriented towards any kind of activity that she believed could bring more value in the training of pupils. She tried to make a world that resembled her. She called her colleagues and friends "children", she borrowed my word with responsibility.
At that moment, a thought struck me: I have to raise people who, when it comes the time, will do the same; raising people.
That’s how at Octavian Goga National High School was born Goga's ARCA, a project incubator.
The idea was simple: I had a lot of students around me, with ideas, creative, but they lacked an organized framework in which to learn, to practice how to turn a dream into reality, to think, write, implement and evaluate projects for the ones that are alike themselves.
We wrote the project Goga's ARCA in one day, the messy haired child and me, her logic and psychology teacher, and submitted it for funding to Ideas for Andrei's Country, a program of OMV Petrom. There were 3 minutes left until the application session was over.
ARCA was one of the 10 winning projects. Big win, we felt like divas.
And the work followed - trainings, working sessions, mentorships, working, agitation.
With just €1,860, in one year we managed to do a lot: 11 of us participated in a training and a competition in the field of academic debates, and then we set up the debating club. We went to 3 of the high schools in Sibiu and organized meetings about the importance of projects written or implemented by students for students. We also organized a project competition and funded 6 of them, one of them being Radio Goga.
ARCA was recognized at national level - it took the Education Award at the first edition of the National Youth Civil Society Gala in Romania in 2014.
ARCA was the beginning, others followed: Training for Democracy, projects to facilitate dialog between youngsters and MEPs, democratic citizenship, but also science, story club, hiking and sports. Basically, any idea that offered something, with an impact, sustainable, we tried to put it into practice.
We saw how the kids were growing by growing others.
For example, the 'Sophia' debating club was run entirely by the pupils: the older ones guided the younger ones, doing a kind of effective mentoring, and to me reached only the effects: 'Prof, we had a super cool match in the advanced, who debated heatedly whether deceased artists should be recreated in digital form without their antemortem consent'. How could you not love them?
It's been 10 years. ARCA still exists. What are the teenagers around me?
They have the same fears and terrors as other generations - they fear of not being loved or accepted, they fear of being abandoned or misunderstood, they fear this big, incredibly-paced world, of the fact that others don’t see them or do not pay enough attention to risk behaviors, they fear failure.
Sometimes we- the big people- are like them, right?
And they as well are creative, digital, expressive, enthusiastic, artistic, immortal and willing to teach you.
Do you know how long it took a 10th grader to teach me how to use a smart board? 2 minutes, with a surgical precision: 'Look, teach, press the blue button, choose the pencil, set how the writing is, thin lines or not, and that's it, that's enough, discovery learning is next, right? You're the one who told us about it, I can't rob you of that pleasure!"
How do I raise them?
I have three values in mind and I tell them:
Be disciplined. Learn to add to yourself every day, work, build yourself, and if you're in a place where you're not learning and not contributing, leave. Apply the law of two feet, you are not a tree.
Be honest! With yourself, with others, with the Universe, it's the easiest way to live!
Be responsible. If you take on something, try to do that small thing very well, it will become a habit. Go until the end even if it's hard.
ARCA is today a magical space of trust, where students learn that their ideas can be valuable, that between the dream and the built reality is just willpower and working with their peers. We believe that ARCA is the place to practice how amazing you can be and learn by teaching others.
I'm a teacher and I am raising people. Probably the most beautiful experience in the world.
