J-Term Day 1

January 7, 2020

Day 1

Today was the first day of my personal J-Term that I planned for myself (See earlier blogs) and I immediately realized that this is going to be much more work than I had thought, but in a good way. You see, I forgot that the kids were, you know… children. And that children don’t understand things that you say as well as “full size” people which made things difficult. You see, some of them had slightly flawed “logic” and things that just seemed logical to me just didn’t didn’t make sense to them. Which surprised me because objective truths suddenly became far less objective after they’d had a look at them. Children are have such amazing potential because they have the power to take in and retain so much information upon interacting with it just a single time. I was teaching them rounding today and many of them were able to get the right answer right away but couldn’t possibly begin to explain how to their confused classmates how/why 19 is closer to 20 than it is to 10 making it so that 19 rounds to 20 and not 10. To anyone with kids I’m sure that you’re used to this, but for me this was… a first. What I did was I had them sit with me at a table and I went through explaining the concept, showing them how to do it, and going through some practice problems with me there. When I thought that they were ready I wrote them somewhere around 10-15 problems and had them work on them on their own and come back to me when they were done. Even though I had only spent ~20 minutes with each of them, seeing them come back with the problems done correctly was so rewarding because I knew that I had taught them that and that they had actually understood what I was trying to tell them. Just the first day and just teaching them something as simple as rounding taught me so much and I am so excited to see where the rest of this J-Term course goes. At the High School after helping out in the classroom, I came up with a plan where I will stay and have lunch with “Art of Cooking” and hang out with them so that I would be able to stay there for their 2 hour break from work so that there will not be a total waste and so I would actually be able to stay there and help out in the classroom after lunch. And this also helped me with getting back as I can just hop on the bus that “Art of Cooking” takes back to campus. I believe that this demonstrates Learning Outcome 2 (Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process.) because I have undertaken a large challenge and I will need to develop new skills to continue this process. I am doing this to help out in the classroom as well as advance my own knowledge so I believe that this fits under the category of Service.