The first couple of days coming back to the center was a bit weird for me. I felt that we had worked hard for a year to build a great learning environment with some norms and ideas. However, within a month of not being there things changed drastically and we felt very didactic and very stern as facilitators. I felt that we had moved too strongly in the academic direction perhaps responding to feedback from parents and the community. The value of being child centric is something we still need to stay focused on. I feel that it is important not to get too caught up with what the children are going to do in the future and let them grow without that additional pressure on them. I wouldn’t say this was completely bad though as there were strong strides in the children’s academic progress though I did feel that it came at the cost of democracy and freedom for the learners. Despite having a learner centric mindset for a year it was so easy to revert to the norm. I really felt quite down about this. I felt that I was getting angry and frustrated too and that was definitely something that really bothered me. It was as though the culture of the space had changed overnight.  However, It was great that the children themselves let me see this. I had many children ask me why I was so angry on one of the days and that was especially eye-opening. To hear that coming from the children also gave me some faith that we had made some real change. I recognized that a lot of this may also be down to us not having enough resources. The number of children has gone up to almost 50-60 a day consistently and with one less facilitator when I was away there must have been a sense of being overwhelmed. After conversing with other facilitators it was great to hear that they too had similar concerns. We agreed that going forward the center needs to develop its own culture and norms that would work whether we were there or not at the center. The idea should be to create a learning environment that is driven by a group culture and norms rather than the whims of some people. This is what we mean by having democratic learning spaces. We agreed that we need to work on building a culture for the center and really focus on recognising and following norms.  Today really felt like an awesome bounce back. Having brought back stationery for everyone and colouring sheets for everyone to work on it felt that we went back to the crescendo that we reached when I had left for my trip. Coming in on Saturday and cleaning up the center too really helped with setting the mood at the center. We also spent some time re-established norms as a large group. Despite having 50-60 people today the chaos felt manageable and things went great. Every single child at the center felt engaged today and were working on something or the other. I must add here that we did have plenty of volunteers today so that is something that definitely helped.