My Experience as a Teacher Impostor at Ramy Helal

On October 10th me an my teammates woke up early on a Tuesday to embark on a journey to a local school with the intent of doing some activities for us to get to know each other and discuss topics related to AI, fake news, and bias.

At first I was very nervous because I had no idea what to expect, us being the educators meant that we had to be in control no matter what and we cannot let the classroom environment turn into chaos (I’ve been there). But at the same time, seeing my colleagues after arriving that day made me more at ease as we’re all in this together.

Nevertheless, the bus trip was probably one of the most fun part of that day, sitting with Youssef goofing around and laughing like 12 year olds again 😄. Aliaa was a bit annoyed by this but I think she was just jealous of the chemistry of the bro-hood.

I think we kind of won the student lottery because they were all unique with their personalities, we learned about they passions, ambitions, and fears. While some had a more darker side than others, I think overall they’re all very cooperative and we felt comfortable interacting with them.

Upon arriving I realized that I’m not that tall for my age, but we had a warm welcome. We had a very casual introduction between us and the children and sooner than later everyone was comfortable to talk and express their thoughts and any questions they had.

Initially we had planned to warm things up with activities such as their interests in pictures, the mad tea exercise, and then finally talk about AI, fake news, and bias. Throughout the exercises they did ask us with these topics so we lightly discussed some AI topics before indulging deeper in the last discussion.

Reflecting on our performance, I think we were not that organized in the flow of topics, we also has some synchronization issues at the beginning but it all worked fine in the end. I believe this was mainly because we didn’t know what to expect and a little nervousness but now we know how to better plan and prepare for the next visits. But all in all I think we’re the perfect team for a great group of students  💪.

Here’s an awkward photo of us at the very beginning of meeting the students:

(We were forced to take this photo, we look like hostages.)