New Canaan Country School Teaching Intern
Bruce Hallett, 2010
I spent my 2009 January term interning in the upper school science department at the New Canaan Country School in New Canaan, Connecticut. With some initial hesitations about missing much of the Vermont ski season and the always popular j-term, I arrived at the Country School with pretty much zero teaching experience but with a mindset of getting a feel for the profession. While I’ve always considered teaching as something that I may consider pursuing in my post-collegiate career I took the country school position with the objective of getting a feel for the teaching role and seeing if it was indeed something that I could see myself doing or oppositely, something I completely disliked.
I worked in the upper school science department, primarily with the seventh grade. I also did some work with in a Middlebury alum’s classroom (Will McDonough ’07) helping with a cultural geography project on Africa they were working on. In addition to my teaching duties I also was an assistant coach for the JV basketball team, which was always a fun change from the standard classroom experience.
At the beginning of the month I sat down with the two teachers that I would primarily be working with, Scott Lilley and Caryn Purcell, and outlined the month. They were great and gave me plenty of freedom to get involved to various degrees depending on how comfortable I was in any particular class or covering any particular topic. I also worked with them to determine lesson plans and the outline for what we wanted to cover for the month that I was around. I reflected on my own experience learning about environmental issues and brought many interesting and fun ideas I had to the table. We implemented some, including owl pellets to look at food webs and food chains, and using satellite images to assess and facilitate discussions about certain environmental issues. As the month drew on I became more and more confident in my approach in the classroom, constantly receiving positive feedback from Scott and Caryn.
Overall my experience at the New Canaan Country School was a fantastic experience. Getting the opportunity to get involved in the classroom as an undergraduate is not very common, let alone in the realm of environmentalism. To get both aspects in the same internship was exactly what I was looking for when first seeking an off campus internship. The folks at the New Canaan Country School we’re fantastic in helping me get acclimated both to the school and the climate of a classroom. While I can’t say with certainty that the experience has convinced me to pursue a career in education, it has shown me that indeed I could picture myself in such an environment.
Contact the Career Services Office for more information about this internship!