(Teaching Workshop 2, Pleasant Grove, UT)
Cole:
The morning of our second teaching workshop began like any other: Maceo loudly singing us awake with ad-libbed lyrics at 5:30am, and Anna, already well into her day, handing me a hot cup of coffee from the local shop she had been working at (Anna is simultaneously doing this trip and launching an affordable medical device startup) for the past hour or two. Our hosts Cool Chris and Cooler Kendra had set out a breakfast of cereal and fresh fruit for us, which we inhaled before gathering our teaching supplies and driving to the local school for our workshop. The pre-teaching jitters set in as we pulled into the school; this was only my second time teaching, and we were teaching for an hour instead of only 20 minutes each. I was nervous about whether I’d be able to make my lesson plan interesting; I’d come up with a new and (hopefully) improved one since ambitiously and mostly unsuccessfully attempting to teach Special Relativity to the first group. I felt a bit more confident after reviewing my new lesson plan (how to calculate the distance to and size of distance objects, like planets, just by looking at them). We walked out to the main entrance to greet the students and sign them in, and I took the first group to the lawn outside to start my lesson. It was a bigger group than last time, maybe 20 students, but they were older and seemed to be more focused. After the first, explanation based part of my lesson, we started the main activity: picking visible items outside, from trees to fire hydrants to distant mountains, and calculating their distance and size. It was so fun (and a huge relief) to see the students actually doing the activity and at least pretending to be interested. When we ran out of time with our lesson (I managed to fill up the whole hour, woohoo!), some of them even asked me follow-up questions that I was supposed to find and give them the answers to throughout the day! Great success! I felt way better about the lesson, but had noticed more than a few areas that I could improve on, and made changes to my outline as I watched Asia demonstrate the properties of non-Newtonian fluids in her chemistry lesson. Since I had finished my teaching for the day, I spent the rest of the day helping out with the team’s classes. It was so much fun working with and getting to know the kids—while helping during Anna’s electricity lesson, one of the students explained to me how he liked to build projects like dog-sized robots and air conditioning systems for fun—so cool!
After a super fun (but exhausting day teaching) we rewarded ourselves with ice cream in town, and headed back to the house for movies and charades with our awesome hosts. I wanted to go explore a canyon I had passed the day before on a ride, and biked to it to set up a hammock over the river, read my books, and steal some rare alone time before coming back to a hot dinner from Chris and Kendra. All in all, it was a really rewarding day, and it felt amazing to have some bonus time in the mountains after so many miles of desert!
Asia Captivates her students as she teaches Chemystery
Sean explains Nash Equilibrium as part of his Game Theory Workshop
Travis teaches about memory, illusions, and neuroscience