My Education Week: I feel like the Pied Piper

Curator Mark ONeill at the Little Museum of Dublin on St Stephens Green with pupils from St Pius X Girls National School. Photograph: Simon OConnor

We are working with Dublin Theatre Festival on a temporary exhibition in the Little Museum. Everything has been lent by a bunch of generous theatre junkies, and today is the first time all of the material is together in one place. Now begins the fun: taking this disparate collection of memorabilia and using it to tell a story. The delivery man almost walks straight into a door with a plate of glass from one of the display cases. Thank heavens for bubble-wrap.

Our education programme, I Love Dublin, offers free civic classes to schoolchildren every morning. Thanks to the law firm Matheson, more than 3,000 kids will receive free classes this year. The programme is just starting up again this week. I start calling schools to invite them to participate. As the programme enters its third year, its getting easier to convince teachers to come back, and we get a few bookings for the end of the week.

One of the most fun things Im working on is a collaborative exhibition with Clerys heritage gallery and Luas Cross City on the history of Dublins trams. The demise of Dublins tramways in the 1940s was one of the most unfortunate consequences of our reckless and haphazard approach to civic planning, and Im glad were celebrating them at the museum. In the morning, I speak to Michael Corcoran, who literally wrote the book on the subject (Through Streets Broad and Narrow). I could study the trams for a week and learn less than I do in half an hour with him.

Two transition-year groups join us in the afternoon. The format of our classes is different for primary and secondary groups, but in both we discuss the conditions of tenement dwellers in Dublin a century ago. Henrietta Street was once the grandest address in the capital, but by 1911 it was effectively a shanty town. Most of the students gasp when I tell them that one of the houses had more than 100 residents. A lad at the back gets the gravity of the situation. Jaysis, he says, and theyd no wifi.

We have a few last-minute additions to our theatre festival exhibition courtesy of the Gate Theatre, so I cycle there, and then on to the framers, where I pick up some beautiful old posters that will soon find their way into our permanent collection.

In the morning the fifth-class pupils from Catherine McAuley School come in for I Love Dublin. Catherine McAuley is a school for dyslexic children, and one of my favourite groups; theyve participated in the programme since it began. We welcome them with a blast of our second World War air-raid siren one of the most effective ways of getting 25 10-year-olds to stay quiet long enough to tell them your name and ask them to sit around the fireplace in the museum. We talk about the tenements and the 1916 Rising. Any educator will tell you that teaching requires patience, but not too much patience, and, as the kids get more comfortable at the museum, they become more excitable too. Four teachers and I struggle to get a word in edgeways.

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My Education Week: I feel like the Pied Piper