Catch Up - Teaching Camp

This is a journal entry I wrote a few weeks ago, during the third week of orientation, but didn't get to post until now:

I just finished our second day of Practicum, a sort of summer camp World Teach holds for teaching kids and practicing lessons before the actual school year starts. My first day teaching actually went really well. I had prepped for a long time, reading a bunch and spending over three hours making maps for the unit I am doing (Geography). Our class was supposed to be a bunch of 8th graders, but it rained a lot on Tuesday and very few students showed up. We ended up with two 12th graders we stole from another class, who are apparently two of the best students on the Marshall Islands. They are both really smart girls, but definitely lack a lot of the knowledge star students in an American high school would have. We spent all of class identifying continent shapes (which were amazingly hard to trace and cut out) and putting them up on a globe and guessing their names. The girls had some concept of most of this, but struggled with a lot of the details. I found it very interesting that they could immediately identify all of the world’s oceans (a task I probably could not have accomplished before yesterday) but struggled to recall the names and/or locations of most countries. I guess that is what is to be expected in such a water-driven culture. The students couldn’t name any country in Asia besides China and had no idea where any country is located, which I thought was crazy for such bright kids, but I guess it is something that is just not taught here.

After the first session on Tuesday, I spent three or four hours prepping for today’s lesson and felt really prepared. However, today ended up as a much more difficult session than yesterday. I was trying to teach hemispheres and time zones, but overestimated the students’ prior knowledge. I basically spent all of class reviewing the locations of the continents and trying to explain why different parts of the world are different times. I forgot to bring balls to explain how the earth revolves around the Sun and it was way too abstract of a concept to explain in the short amount of time I had allocated. The class was supposed to focus on an activity / game I had created for learning time zones, but the students definitely were not ready for it. Overall it was a pretty exasperating class and I am wondering if I should repeat the lesson tomorrow or just accept that it was a bust.

-- I ended up having much more success with my last two days of class and was really glad to have spent the week teaching some of the best students in the country. It was a good chance to prepare for what I’m sure will be a very challenging year.