In the beginning...

Thus begins the blog. For those of you who are unaware of my situation, I am an outdoor sciences instructor whose name shall remain nameless, at a camp that shall remain nameless due to the publicity of this blog. I teach outdoor education to 6th and 7th graders throughout the duration of the fall. Too much ridiculousness goes down on a daily basis to prevent me from sharing it with the world through the shameless, tawdry projection known as the internet. I figure if Steve Blake’s wife has a Twitter account that people follow, why shouldn’t I have a blog for the things that truly are interesting (or at least I find them to be).

I started work last week as the kitchen helper. Each instructor has to “do time” as the kitchen helper throughout the fall and I got mine done early. I was also required to shadow other instructors as they taught, which meant that I was working non-stop for two days straight (6:30am-8:30pm). This might be a reasonable expectation if I was either paid hourly, or was given overtime for working more than 8 or 9 hours a day (is that really what normal people’s work hours are like?). This was the time, however, that I was supposed to be learning how to teach. I worked here during the summer, so I picked up a few of the lessons from that, but the fall outdoor school programs are different, so as it turns out, I will be throwing out most of my previous knowledge anyway. But this all happened last week.

This week, I began teaching! Very exciting! I had been losing sleep over the idea for the past three nights (that’s just how I roll, I suppose).

Allow me to begin by saying that I am not new to teaching. I taught outdoor science education as a student leader at the public middle school’s outdoor program in high school and part of college. I learned my way around those lesson plans like the back of my hand after spending 8 weeks there spread over 6 years. We taught from laminated note cards provided by our lead instructors, so we really just had to be good at reading, and pretending like we knew what we were talking about it, summarized appropriately as “fake it ‘till you make it.” It required no research, and if you were good enough at it, you really didn’t need to see it taught before you felt comfortable taking the plunge and teaching yourself.

In spite of the fact that I had previous teaching experience, this is different. We are given vocabulary words, concepts and recommended activities that everyone else ignores because they require extraneous amounts of prep time, which is extraordinarily limited. What I end up teaching becomes some sort of twisted cacophony of various instructor’s ideas combined with cracked out ideas from the book. The chemical formula for this equation would look like this (I’ve been thinking scientifically, ok? BACK OFF!)

Instructor 1’s intro + (instructor 2’s lesson plan + instructor 3’s lesson plan) + alternative teaching method listed in the syllabus + instructor 4’s ‘outro’ = BEST LESSON EVER (with a slight amount of disunity and tangential thoughts)

I find myself getting excited about some semi-related thought and following it for awhile until I realize that I’ve deviated a great distance from the originally intended fact or concept.

It’s funny because my education is in theatre…. and general biology/ marine biology, so OF COURSE I’M TEACHING GEOLOGY IN THE MIDDLE OF A HIGH DESERT!!! HOORAY!! I enjoy teaching here, but I really feel like my skills would be put to better use if I were teaching more biology and less geo/paleo, but I always love an opportunity to expand my skill set. My 5-hour geo/paleo lesson combined with a beastly 4-mile, 500’ elevation gain and lost hike went extraordinarily smoothly, as did my reptiles and amphibians lesson and team challenge activity. Tomorrow, I’m off to teach the geo/ paleo loop again packed with animal physiology, which I’m going to bullshit my way through for 90 minutes. It’s gonna be a party

Random fun fact of the day: 6th grade cheerleaders are just as ditzy and clueless as high-school cheerleaders

Random science fact of the day: When snakes are eating, they can’t breathe. They have two lungs: one below the other, which they fill with air prior to prey consumption. I’ll bet that’s why you don’t hear of very many asthmatic gopher snakes!

Feel good moment of the day: There was a very quiet girl that I noticed the first day during rec-time who was sitting by herself far away from the other children. I asked her if she was okay and when she said ‘yes’, I went on my merry way because I had a lesson to prep. Today, I signed up for rec-activity leading and after being suggested by another instructor, I decided to take out the Play-dough and a big piece of butcher paper with pens and colored pencils and see who wanted to create (gasp) ART with me. This girl came over and spent almost the entire time drawing various things and they were very good. She was very quiet and humble and after about 30-40 minutes went on her morose and sullen way. Strange, but I was glad I was able to provide an alternate entertainment for a child who clearly was not a big sports fan. Side note – This child with a curly fo-hawk spent 15 minutes making chickens out of Play-dough, axes out of Play-dough and mercilessly chopping their heads off leaving behind pools of Play-dough blood. Ah, to be a middle-school boy again…

Until next time, my friends and whoever else took time out of their day to read one tired, yet humored and decently satisfied young teacher’s thoughts. Thank you and goodnight.