Another Aim High summer is over and done. Whew!
I love it while I'm in the midst of it and wouldn't trade the opportunity for anything but it really does take all the stuffing out of me. It's a 6-week enrichment program for middle school students that I often talk about. I suppose that my teaching muscle was in need of some stretching. After five weeks of teaching 8th graders science it’s safe to say that I've gotten it out of my system for another couple of months at least. Aim High was that wonderful alchemy of stress, joy, difficulty, excitement and exhaustion. I truly can’t imagine a summer without Aim High but now that I’ve got a full time job it’s harder to fit it into my schedule. Luckily for me they were willing to be flexible at the bookstore so things have worked out well and I’m happy.
Oh boy oh boy was it a long summer. There were personality clashes with students, fun with staff members and drama in pretty heavy doses. All in all I’m glad that I gave everything up for a couple of weeks because you get the time to sleep later but you can never get the experiences back.
I met an awesome woman this summer, her name’s Susana and she was my teaching partner. We had so much in common both ideologically and pedagogically. It was an absolute joy teaching with her. Often in a class with two strong teachers things get tense as people try to push their own agenda but we were always able to break things down and make sense of what we each wanted very easily. We compromised and the kids benefited from our easy collaboration.
I’m also proud of my teaching intern this summer. She was willing to step up to the plate every day to teach either a section or to perform the task of explaining the activity to the class. It felt really good to know that part of her comfort came from the environment we’d been able to foster in the classroom. I haven’t done this particular job quite so well in the last couple of summers at Aim High.
We spent the summer focusing on Botany and hopefully the feedback the kids gave us was accurate and they now know how to use a microscope and understand the process of sexual reproduction in plants. As you can well imagine talking about any kind of sex with 8th graders is an exercise in stress generation. One of the funniest moments was when one particularly rambunctious student looked at the white pollen from a gladiola and exclaimed, “that looks like human…uhm…pollen!” I refused to let him off the hook and asked, “do you mean sperm?”
The look on his face was priceless.
Oh boy oh boy was it a long summer. There were personality clashes with students, fun with staff members and drama in pretty heavy doses. All in all I’m glad that I gave everything up for a couple of weeks because you get the time to sleep later but you can never get the experiences back.
I met an awesome woman this summer, her name’s Susana and she was my teaching partner. We had so much in common both ideologically and pedagogically. It was an absolute joy teaching with her. Often in a class with two strong teachers things get tense as people try to push their own agenda but we were always able to break things down and make sense of what we each wanted very easily. We compromised and the kids benefited from our easy collaboration.
I’m also proud of my teaching intern this summer. She was willing to step up to the plate every day to teach either a section or to perform the task of explaining the activity to the class. It felt really good to know that part of her comfort came from the environment we’d been able to foster in the classroom. I haven’t done this particular job quite so well in the last couple of summers at Aim High.
We spent the summer focusing on Botany and hopefully the feedback the kids gave us was accurate and they now know how to use a microscope and understand the process of sexual reproduction in plants. As you can well imagine talking about any kind of sex with 8th graders is an exercise in stress generation. One of the funniest moments was when one particularly rambunctious student looked at the white pollen from a gladiola and exclaimed, “that looks like human…uhm…pollen!” I refused to let him off the hook and asked, “do you mean sperm?”
The look on his face was priceless.