After a rest day yesterday spent finalizing lesson plans, I was excited to get a chance to teach. The teaching workshop didn’t start til 2:30, so we spent the morning practicing our lesson plans on each other and giving feedback. It was fun to see the creative ways everyone had come up with to teach complex ideas through games and activities that students of all ages could learn from. Lesson practice was followed by some last-minute runs (maybe more like walks) to the store to pick up teaching supplies. Sean had disappeared earlier in the morning and reappeared looking clean and well-groomed (a rare sight for any of us these past few weeks). He explained that he had taken a hose-shower on the church lawn next to the cars blowing by on Highway 50 outside. Travis, Maceo and I didn’t have enough time to find a shower in town, so we brought our soap up to the lawn to give hose-showering a try. It was much easier than our previous showers, which have involved such water sources as a rotating sprinkler on a sloped lawn (my personal favorite), but the water was significantly colder, evoking some strange high-pitched sounds from all of us as we tried to scrub ourselves clean enough to look like we belonged in a classroom, let alone teaching the students in that classroom.
After another successful and unique shower experience, we reviewed lesson plans one more time. Sean and I drove to the post office to pick up our long-awaited bike tools, which hadn’t delivered in time for our departure from Palo Alto, then picked the rest of the team up from the church to go teach—woohoo! We arrived at the local library and began to set up shop in a classroom. Only two of us would be teaching at once, which meant the other four would help with the ongoing lessons. As students began to arrive, Sean and I helped Anna start her lesson while Travis, Maceo, and Asia began to teach another group of students. I had been expecting mostly older middle school and high school students, so it came as a surprise to see some elementary school aged kids, some of their siblings (who might have been older than me) taking care of them, and their parents and relatives (who were definitely older than me) there too. When it came my time to teach, I quickly realized that my plan to explain Einstein’s Special Relativity was a little ambitious, and I started braintorming ways to improve it immediately after it was over (I only had 40 minutes until I was teaching again). After helping with Anna and Sean’s lessons again, I was up, and had a bit less trouble with the lesson thanks to bouncy ball props, train diagrams, and fun facts about rocket ships and time.
I was exhausted by the end of the day—it had been a lot of biking over the past weeks and a lot of teaching that afternoon, but it was tons of fun to work with such smart kids (I think some of them could have taught my lesson better than me), and to finish our first day of teaching!
After teaching, we came back to the church to cook our last meal in a real kitchen (I think I see canned garbanzo beans in my future) and talk about our experiences teaching, then rest up for more riding tomorrow. We have our first 100 mile day coming up!
Cole
