Tag Archives: Education

Biblioteca David Kitson

Biblioteca David Kitson, Costa Rica

Megan Nesbeth, 2011

The fact that I was able to have the experience of teaching English in Costa Rica as part of my college experience is singularly enough to convince me that choosing to attend Middlebury was the right choice. If you had asked me, when I graduated from high school, what I forecasted my future college career looking like I would never have expected teaching in Costa Rica to be a part of my journey, yet this experience has affected me so greatly that I am sure that it will play a large part in shaping my remaining time at Middlebury and my general outlook on life.

For a month I walked the tightrope between being a gringo (American ex-pat) and a Tico (native Costa Rican) as I lived in Nosara, a small town where everyone knew me as one of the Middlebury English teachers. In the most concise terms my responsibilities were simply to teach two English classes – one to children and one to adults each day. As simple as that sounds the preparations necessary to accomplish my duties and the stamina to carry out my plans were far from easy. Don’t get me wrong, eventually I got the hang of teaching, we all did, but as someone who has never taken a teacher’s ed course, had never had formal teaching experience before or even the desire to be a teacher this internship was a lot of work. Just teaching on the board is never enough, especially since the director of the program insists that no Spanish be spoken in the classroom. There is always something more that not should, but must be prepared. In addition to requiring hours of planning teaching is a constant performance for the duration of your class. Teaching is also a job that comes with a large amount of accountability because not only do you answer to a boss, and in our case receive constructive criticism from two mentors who would observe our classes, you are accountable to the parents who pay for their children to attend these classes and the adult learners who pay their own way, and accountable to the students who are giving you their time. All in all, it is very easy to see when a class is working or not because the students can either use what you are teaching them or they stare back at you with blank and overwhelmed expressions written on their faces.

Each morning I would wake up, have some personal time, get ready for work, review the lesson plan for my morning class with my co-teacher, Evan, and then go teach an hour and a half class to twelve high-schoolers. Due to the number of students who signed up for the Colegiales (High-schoolers) course and the group dynamic between those students we decided with our on-site mentors that it would be best to teach a larger class together than splitting the students into two smaller groups to teach smaller classes. The main challenges of teaching the Colegiales class was keeping the students engaged and having fun during what was essentially voluntary summer school and always remembering to account for the differences in cognition levels between our youngest students aged thirteen and fourteen and the oldest who was twenty-two years old. Team-teaching is wonderful because it gives you another person to lean on when you encounter difficulty explaining a concept, another person’s energy to build off of, and even just someone to keep the class moving if you need a bathroom break during the class. Yet like any form of collaborative work, team-teaching presents its own set of challenges. You have to learn how to transition seamlessly from a section that you are teaching to that which your co-teacher is teaching and vice versa. You have to learn how to respect each other’s time in terms of deciding when to plan your lessons for the next day. You have to learn how to adapt your own teaching style, which is itself constantly evolving, to work with that of your partner and you have to learn how to see what your partner is seeing so as to help each other successfully execute the activities that you propose.

For both the children’s and adults’ class we prepared a daily lesson plan for the class. In the case of the children’s class we made many posters and visual aids to teach our lessons, we prepared flashcards, bingo boards, pictures for concentration, and the materials for a variety of other activities depending on the day. For the adult class in addition to preparing my lesson plans I spent a lot of time using the resources available at the library to teach various grammar points and finding the best activities, references, and worksheets that I could to photocopy for my class. With them I made posters as well. In both classes, but more so with the kids, we played a lot of physical games to keep them moving and energized.

Whereas the children in the morning were divided by age into the class that Evan and I taught and two other classes that Kelly and Pat taught the adults were divided based on their skill level in English. As the Midd student with the least amount of Spanish I took the most advanced group of adult learners. Ironically enough the biggest challenge that I ended up facing with my adult class was their high skill level. Once you get past the point where all of your students are functionally proficient in a language each person has unique things that need to be fixed so you run into the problem of trying to teach to those specific needs and in the process forcing the other students to sit through review. Eventually I got into a rhythm where I learned how to plan multi-level activities so that all of my students could practice the same skill at the same time, but each at the level that is right for them.

Now that I am back at Middlebury I can see how far reaching the effects of my time spent in Costa Rica are on my life. My time in Costa Rica wasn’t only about teaching. It was the whole experience of living on my own in another country and taking in Costa Rica. Really this wasn’t just an internship experience, but a mini-semester abroad. New senses of confidence, self-assuredness, and calmness have all entered my life since returning from Costa Rica. For the first time in a long time I am trusting myself and doing what I want to do instead of what I think that I should want to. My month in Costa Rica will easily rank as one of the best experiences of my life for years to come. It taught me that I can live on my own, that maybe one day I will teach adults again, and that life doesn’t have to move at a New York pace at all times. Sleep has value as does waking and it is a beautiful thing to allow your body and life to once again be dictated by the rhythm of the sun.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship!

The Engineering School

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The Engineering School, Boston, MA

Casey Mahoney, 2011

Looking back on the month, I feel that I performed well in the duties expected of me and took on many duties and roles that were not necessarily “assigned” to me. In the first week of observing, it was hard to take much initiative in the classroom beyond answering a few random side questions and such, as students were writing for the first three days and Matt, whose classroom I observed, had made his plans for the rest of the week. Nevertheless, I gathered plenty of insight from the discussions and meetings with faculty in which I participated. In the second week, I was eager to take on some lessons, and I feel that in my preparation of the lessons, my communicating my plans with Matt, and in my presentation of them I met and his expectations for me, a prospective teacher with no teaching experience in a high school classroom.

Being in front of a class was much more difficult than I expected: I overestimated first, the amount of work that I could accomplish in a period and second, the ease with which I would be able to have an at-ease rapport with the class. Proper discipline and general order was something I really had to work at maintaining, especially since during my first period, Matt was called away and I was on my own, and frankly, I was caught off guard, since I had never been in an urban school. Yet, I did have a number of successes while teaching. I felt like I provided quite a few “aha” moments of understanding, especially when going over some of the SAT test preparation, but also when some of the students started to get engaged with the history debates activity and were arguing and conceding points.

Having led multiple retreat-type trips with middle- and high- school-aged students before, I knew that the week at Middlebury with ten eleventh-grade students would be a long, high-energy, busy, sometimes stressful, but mostly fun adventure. My performance exceeded what was “expected” of me, in the sense that an extraordinary amount of predicting, planning, and quick execution was required for a smoothly run week to have happened, and I feel that I did all these well. At some times, I felt that the facilitation of the events, getting people places, planning ahead, and so forth, sometimes got in the way of my being able to be totally present to the students at all times, but overall, I was also successful in that.

This relates well to what is one of the most important things I learned through this internship. In my “Literacy Across the Secondary Curriculum” course in Fall 2008, Dr. Claudia Cooper said on multiple occasions, “The profession of teaching involves being a student of students.” Seeing the vast range of interests, backgrounds, motivation levels, and so much more, all of which differed to a great degree from what I am used to seeing in a high school setting, Claudia’s statement has become a concrete reality for me as a prospective teacher. It is indeed crucial for teachers to be aware of their students and their needs on so great a level, and the intricacies of this task were made much more apparent to me during my internship.

I also learned plenty about the career industry in general. After seeing two of us interns’ supervising teachers receive news that they would most likely be laid off at the end of the school year, the issue of job security became a bit more concrete for me as well. I cannot say whether or not I will be a teacher at some point in my life; nevertheless, this experience showed me how necessary professionalism, colleagueship, collaboration, and utilization of resources and staff development/training all are to a workplace. In my career search, it will be important for me to find an organization that values and models these things as well as TES did in Boston.

Although I have worked with different organizations on projects and activities similar to the ones I participated in during this internship, this was certainly a unique combination of observation and leading, of looking back and planning ahead, and of involvement in others’ education and promotion of my own. I am glad I had this opportunity and feel that it will most definitely have an influence on where I am headed on my future career search.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.

College For Every Student

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College For Every Student

Ashley Bairos, 2010

This J-Term I completed an internship with College For Every Student (CFES), an educational organization just down the road in Cornwall, VT. In the spring of 2008 I proposed a type of e-mentoring program with the hope of connecting more college students with more high school students in urban areas. By utilizing the Internet, my hope was to foster a greater desire within high school students to take hold of their own education. I shared this idea with Rick Dalton of CFES and an internship was born.

Over the course of January I was charged with the task of arranging and initiating an e-mentoring program in two schools: a middle school in Harlem, NY and a high school in Moriah, NY. 15 students were chosen from the school in Harlem and partnered with a Middlebury student mentor. Each pairs corresponded via the Internet and on various checks throughout the term, all contact was reported as going well. With the Moriah school, 5 students were paired with Middlebury mentors to correspond via the Internet as well as face-to-face meetings. Unfortunately, as things ended up, the Moriah group was only able to meet once with their mentors, but Internet correspondence continued on a repeated basis. Each week I would talk with my contacts at each school to make sure things were running smoothly on their end and check in with the Middlebury mentors as to the progress of email contact. Occasionally, the Middlebury students would ask my advice on acceptable conversation topics, especially with the middle schoolers from NYC.

This internship was an extremely rewarding experience, but also posed many challenges. In dealing with people from afar there was often an issue with getting in touch with my contacts at each school. We also encountered technical difficulties with email accounts from the children at each school, which set the start date back a couple weeks. Emails could not be received because of IT restrictions, but once the problem was eradicated, emails were begun immediately and continued on a regular basis. Despite the late start, things improved as the children learned about their mentors and engaged in conversations from sports to career aspirations. I have read some of the emails sent from the students at MS45 in Harlem and can see first hand how appreciative these 7^th and 8^th graders are to know that people far away care enough to contact them [some letters have been included]. It’s letters like these that make this project and everyone’s hard work worth all the struggles.

I have always been intrigued by America’s education system. I had a tremendous high school experience that dramatically changed the way I felt about my own education. This is the type of reaction I hope to help foster in others; to take command of their education for the pursuit of self-improvement. In addition to general interest, I wanted to use this J-Term assignment as a way to challenge myself and do something that I have never done before. I was thrown into this project, not really what was going to happen or how I was to achieve success. Perhaps discovering the project along the way was one of the most rewarding aspects of the project because it felt good to finally get it right. In addition, not having a regular schedule was difficult for me because it forced me to regulate myself and stay on top of my responsibilities. The internship was a nice preview into the real world and what the working environment will feel like after graduation from Middlebury. I felt depended on and I enjoyed having a different set of responsibilities if even just for a month.

My internship experience was wonderful and I have no regrets about accepting the challenge to try something completely different. Despite several hardships along the way, the experience has enriched my education and taught me much about my own work ethic and creativity. I had a great time working with Rick and his staff and would do it again in a heartbeat. The achievements of CFES are so amazing and innovative and I feel blessed to have worked with them and learned so much during my J-Term experience.

Please contact the Career Services Office for more information on this internship.

New Canaan Country School

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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!

La Biblioteca Kitson in Nosara, Costa Rica

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La Biblioteca Kitson in Nosara, Costa Rica

Kelly Bennion, 2010

I feel that I performed very well throughout this month. After hearing students from the year prior describe that they went surfing each day, I came into the internship underestimating the amount of work that goes into planning two English classes each day. I had to plan different lessons for the children’s class and adult class because although my adult class was still comprised of beginning and intermediate speakers, there were activities that were only appropriate for one group or the other. The four of us that were together in Nosara worked incredibly hard to be prepared each day, and we certainly received recognition as a result. One of our supervisors, Faith Burke, who sat in on our classes to observe us, said that we were the most prepared group that she has seen throughout the entire fourteen or so years of the program. It was quite an honor.

Each day, after I taught my morning children’s class (children ages 10-14), I would immediately prepare for the next day’s lesson. Planning lessons took at least a couple hours, simply because we had to write formal lesson plans, including the motivation for the lesson, necessary materials, development of the lesson, and reinforcement activities. This also required studying the books that we were given (The ExpressWays series and the Ready-to-Go series) in order to figure out which topics were deemed “important” in the realm of learning English, as well as seeing how the experts have determined is the best way to teach English. Also, every lesson included some sort of physical activity (sometimes using the book Total Physical Response), which would give the class a small break to keep active and move their bodies.

I usually planned my adult lesson each afternoon, after planning my children’s lesson. The adult lessons took a significant amount of time to prepare, simply because the classes were two hours long. It took a great deal of creativity to plan lessons that would keep the adults interested, without a break, for two complete hours. I really enjoyed planning these lessons, simply because the adults were incredibly motivated to learn. Some of my favorite lessons included a scavenger hunt including the words, “next to,” “between,” “across from,” “on,” and “around the corner from,” asking the students, “Is there a ___________ in the refrigerator?” or “Are there __________ in the refrigerator,” having given them a picture of a refrigerator and food that I drew, playing clapping and rhythmic games with the days of the week, months of the year, cardinal and ordinal numbers, doing charades of present progressive verbs, having them draw a picture of a house and describing activities that people commonly do in each of the rooms of the house, etc. The students asked me for a “game” everyday, so it took a lot of time to think of ways to make classes interesting without compromising the amount they learned. Overall, I think that I found a good balance between oral activities, textbook activities, guided review sheets, quizzes, and physical activities. The most wonderful part of my whole experience in Costa Rica was knowing that for a month, I was not a student teacher, a helper, or even a substitute teacher. I was a teacher.

What I Learned About Myself in the Career Industry

Ever since I was five years old, I have known that I have wanted to be a teacher. I have never known what age students I would like to teach, but I have been blessed with teachers who are so passionate about teaching that I knew that I would want to positively affect others’ lives in this manner. This internship has confirmed for me that I would like to be a teacher for at least a considerable duration of my post-college life. At first, I was worried that being a teacher, at least an elementary school teacher, might not be challenging enough for me. However, this month has taught me that teaching is indeed challenging! As an elementary education minor at Middlebury, I have student taught in a 6^th grade classroom at Mary Hogan Elementary, a 1^st/2^nd grade classroom at Cornwall Elementary, and at the Aurora School (K-6). I have taught many classes in my lifetime, including church Confirmation classes, dance classes, J-term workshops, and more, but this internship is the first time I realized how difficult being a teacher really is! I am incredibly grateful for this realization, and it makes me even more excited to be a teacher!

Also regarding the career industry of teaching, this month has taught me that I would like to be a college professor. I have been pondering the idea since entering Middlebury, but I think I am certain that I would like to be a psychology professor. For me, there is something incredibly stimulating about teaching a group of students who are a) incredibly motivated to learn, and b) sharp and educated enough to ask difficult questions and keep teachers on their toes. I absolutely adored my adult class, which was comprised of students between 16 and 22. Seeing them progress in their English speaking ability and their eagerness to practice their English with me both inside and outside of class was more rewarding of an experience than I have ever experienced.

Reflections on the Entire Experience

In all seriousness, living and teaching English in Costa Rica has been the richest experience of my entire life. Before being selected for this internship, I had been debating the decision whether or not to study abroad as if it were a fifth class. I spent countless hours worrying about whether or not I was making the correct decision, and as soon as I was selected for this internship, I decided that Costa Rica would be my only abroad experience during college. I arrived in Costa Rica a week before the program began and have chosen to travel various parts of Costa Rica during February break.

Besides the teaching, the best part of living in Costa Rica was learning about the culture of the Ticos (the name of the native people). We (the four Middlebury interns) lived in a very small house together, in the center of town, within walking distance from the library. Many of the wealthy Americans that we met in Costa Rica felt incredibly bad for us because we were living a primitive lifestyle, but it was honestly amazing. It was life-changing to see how everyone in Nosara lives – without internet access, only being able to drink well water, cold showers, a house of open air (our walls did not connect to the roof), no air conditioning in the sweltering heat, and bugs everywhere! It was also incredibly liberating not being dependent on my cell phone and to wake up to the sun rising rather than my usual alarm clock after a sleep-deprived night at Middlebury. Also, not having a car, it was quite an experience to hitchhike or walk anywhere we desired to go.

As these six weeks for me comes to a close, I am so incredibly glad that I took J-term to teach English in Costa Rica. I love Middlebury perhaps more than anyone, so it was very difficult for me to be away from my friends and the place that I have called “home” for two and a half years now. However, my time abroad has been an experience that I would not trade for anything. My students are some of the greatest people that I have met in my entire life. The Ticos are genuinely wonderful people; between inviting us over to share the little food and wealth that they have, to picking us up when we hitchhiked, to towing our car out of a ditch when we decided to rent a car and travel to Volano Arenal and Monteverde…the Ticos were there every step of the way! Even my experience traveling between hostel and hostel by myself has been absolutely life-changing.

As a result of this internship and the opportunity to live in Costa Rica in general, I now know that I want to become a teacher after graduating from Middlebury. I do not know if I will ever teach English again, but I will certainly be teaching psychology if not. I would love to return to Costa Rica some time within the next couple years in order to teach English in Nosara again. The only problem with this program is that after the Middlebury interns leave, there are perhaps 70 Ticos frustrated by the fact that they can no longer progress in their English learning. If I decide to graduate a semester early, I hope to return to Nosara to teach English for at least four months to continue where next year’s Middlebury interns will leave off. Even for those who may not want to become teachers after graduating, I highly recommend this internship for the life experience and the opportunity to truly be immersed in another culture. It will most certainly change anyone’s life in a positive manner.

Contact the Career Services Office for more information about this internship!