The teaching project seems to have passed, just as quickly as it became an opportunity.
We went to MUMS with a good plan to carry out our task of teaching the kids something new. Coming back in a classroom where middle school kids are carrying on their daily activities and listening to their teachers brought up some memories and created new thoughts. First off, it was weird for me to come into a classroom where kids were surrounded not only by colorful walls, but a relaxing atmosphere, sofas and seats for relaxation, an organized classroom focused on group work and Smart Boards and Netbooks for enriching the teaching and learning environment.
I jokingly said to Ethan after our presentation “Imagine a classroom in communist times, and there you have my middle school memories”. There was no emphasis on working and collaborating on works together, the only group projects we would get was to draw some stuff and hang them on the walls, knowing that they would be gone the next day. Back then, we couldn’t even imagine being able to use technology in school in or out of the classroom. The coolest and closest thing a kid could have was a CD player, and even that had nothing to do with school work or using technology with schools.
I remember my teacher making us do peer review twice! Well, giving me peer review twice. Kids with the highest scores got to grade the tests of the other kids. That is not peer review at all, but it was closest we had. Now thinking how these kids get to just go online, open a Google Doc, and peer review has never been easier. No matter how much I have used Google Docs, it was different trying to teach it to kids at an age where I could only wish I knew something like that, or thinking about whether I, or any of my peers would have understood it, so although what I said was brief, it felt weird choosing words to describe something and think back on when I was in Middle School for it to help them understand, and for me to teach it.
Thirty minutes also did not seem as enough time to actually go through more in-depth explanation or to answer questions, but these kids seemed to not even need more time. They hopped right into what they had to do, and that was the end of it. It almost made me feel like us telling them what we did might have been trivial for them. And these observations do not include my immense fear of actually teaching something to young kids, teaching people something in general frightens me a bit, and although it is such a meaningful and wonderful job to have, I could never do it.
But I tried, and even if the fear did not go away, it certainly seemed over-exaggerated in my head, previous to this experience.
One of the concluding thoughts I had regarding this teaching project was how using technology has increased immensely, maybe it is a cultural difference I am feeling here, because I know that even today, middle school kids in Macedonia do not use technology in their learning, so there we go again with cultural surprises (it was not a cultural shock, not even close, but it was still surreal to be part of something I once saw in movies and hoped it would be part of my everyday experiences).
The laid-back atmosphere, the confidence these kids have with technology and its use, and the almost informal teacher-student relationship was definitely something new, and I am well aware that that might have just been my observation, but I felt it is very helpful and something that should definitely be implemented back in my school. One of the things it does is decreasing the fear students feel towards their superiors (i.e. teachers), yet it still maintains the respect they should feel, and realize that the person standing in front of them is their second family, teaching them in the best possible way to go out into the world with much more confidence than what I was taught when I was their age.