Kansas City, KS, Teaching at aSTEAM Village
Cole:
We all woke up a little anxious on the morning of our biggest teaching day of the trip, but breakfast (and plenty of coffee) from our host Moira helped calm our nerves. Whereas we’ve taught our lessons only once or twice each per wokshop to groups of about 20 students, today we would all be teaching back to back lessons from 9am to 4pm to a group of 60 students (divided into groups of 10-15 for each class). My nerves were calmed a little by the promise that, if I managed to survive the day, I would be teaching almost as many students today as in the first half of the trip combined—in other words, the effort was more than worthwhile. When we arrived at the workshop venue, a summer camp held at the aSTEAM Village in Kansas City, a warm, grinning man introduced us to some interns from an engineering company who’d be helping us for the day (woohoo!). He warned us we’d have to set up fast because the students were almost ready, and began doling out rooms and assigning interns with practiced efficiency, a sense of urgency, and his trademark grin, all of which seemed to suggest that chaos was about to ensue. And it certainly did: the next 7 hours were a mad scramble of name games, explanations, activities, and rushed conclusions as the next group of students entered before the last had left. At some point we had a lunch break, but it was quickly subsumed by more energetic students. The day was exhausting, but also energizing; the kids were smart, funny, and just the right mix of rule-following and authority-questioning to keep a new teacher (me) from becoming a washed up, authoritarian wreck. Even though it was the hardest day of teaching yet, the energy the students brought to our workshop made it my favorite teaching day of the trip. It helped (a lot) that we had help teaching from the interns and facilitating transitions and breaks from the full time camp employees, we would have been lost without them!
After teaching, we stayed in Kansas City to check out the First-Friday art festival going on in the downtown, and met some boundlessly creative local artists of all mediums. Sleep came easy when we finally made it home!
