So this week I had my first teaching week! I got to teach a group of ten 11 year olds! It was quite the task! I was nervous going into the week and then to kick it off I had this dream about the children getting to camp early and that one of my students was allergic to rain and I had no way to shelter her! Also, (in the dream) my boss yelled at me for being unprepared! yikes! Needless to say I was less than excited to go to our first meeting monday morning and I was even more scared about the children arriving. Turns out they were over an hour late and we were really rushed to get everything done before dinner monday night!
My team had a rough time getting through their team contract and other pre-dinner chores but they managed to make an awesome LNT (Leave no trace) skit about minimizing camp fires. So I was pretty excited for our week to start because I felt like I was going to have a pretty good group. We hot quite a few speed bumps though. my group of students didn't work so well as a team and actually fought quite a bit!
After day 2- Go with the flow (water systems!) where we built watersheds in the sand and played with macro invertebrates I could tell that I was going to have to work on them working as a team. They fought all day, and hit and pushed each other. The funny thing is- I though that it would be the boys who fought all the time- and it was all the girls! So while I thought the kids had fun, besides all the complaining about being tired and hiking too far, I knew we had to revisit respect.
Day 3 we had an incident before breakfast! I had one girl push another and start crying. To discipline the whole group for their actions we wrote in our journals about how to respect each other and then wrote one nice thing about everyone in the group. We were all going to read the nice things people said about us ( because that will help us work as a team right?!) wrong. One student ended up writing some mean things and we ended up leaving campus at 10:45am instead of 9 am because we had three more students crying. The rest of the day went relatively well, behavior wise, but we totaled 6 students crying on wednesday. Although we did learn some really cool things about ecosystems and played some really awesome games.
Day 4 was inquiry day- where the students make up their own project and we go through the scientific method to solve it all day and make a poster. Once again we had some trouble getting together as a team and deciding one hypothesis or one project or one method. So I think to myself.... "lets do a team builder and see if that helps them work as a team!" so after 30 minutes on MOSSes Lan-skies we had made it a third of our destination and the team failed. One girl fell off and cried also. So back to the drawing board where we had two hypotheses that contradicted each other. After a hike where everyone complained and a day that was rougher than the last two due to a lack of teamwork and an epic battle of two 6th grade girls, we missed 30 minutes of free time but FINALLY worked as a team... sorta. The only redeeming factor of the day were the notes that some of the students wrote me.
You will never believe that while I was ripping my hair out and trying to break up all the fighting these kids 1.)had fun 2.) thought I was fun 3.) enjoyed being here 4.) learned something about science. This was most defiantly not the best first week, but I suppose it can only get better from here and I know that I learned a lot from having this group... and maybe through all the yelling, crying and what-not-ing this little buggers actually grew on me.
- well.... til next time. peace and love from Idaho.
