Splash!

So in all fairness, I really don't have a right to post on this. Initially I intended to be really involved, but things turned out a little differently than expected. So while this covers my experience in some detail, the real post on Splash belongs to Jessica. I'd suggest you pester her to actually make this post (especially given that she hasn't posted in so long I think we've all stopped yelling at her for it).

The Event

A brief description of Splash before I begin: Splash is a two day program run by the Educational Studies Program (ESP) here. During Splash, individuals (mostly college students at MIT, though all three of those descriptors (college, student, MIT) are violated every year) sign up to teach classes for middle and high school students. This would be fairly fun as described, but the kicker is: teachers can register any class they want. Anything at all.

So obviously we end up with a lot of "interesting" classes. I actually have no idea if we even have a form of quality control (I'm pretty sure we don't, since at no point did anyone check in with me or my coteacher to review what we were gonna do). Nonetheless, the general atmosphere of the event is pretty exciting, both for teachers and students. For a list of the classes, go to http://esp.mit.edu/learn/Splash/2009/catalog/.

Just like with HMNT, there was a huge preparation phase. Unlike with HMNT, I wasn't involved with it. I'll get to why later, but for now I'll just talk briefly about my class and my admin-y job (which was horribly executed >_>).

Back up a few weeks, maybe a few months, I forget. It was 11:30 PM, 30 minutes before the deadline to register a Splash class. I have some ideas floating around, but I haven't really gotten my thoughts together and come up with a solid class plan. I walk into my neighbor's room to tell him to register a class before the deadline (yes, I recognize the hypocrisy). We sit there for a while discussing class ideas, and as the registration deadline nears, we make a decision: we're going to team-teach a class on Bridge.

Ok, go ahead. Laugh. No, I don't know conventions to save my life, and neither did he, but hey, it would be fun, and we needed to learn at some point anyway. So we registered the class, I tucked my other ideas away for another year, and we went back to psetting.

Fast forward to yesterday night. Realizing that we had done absolutely no preparation (including learning conventions) for our class, we decided to get to work. I got back from doing my admin job for Splash at 10:30, and we set out to find and buy decks of cards. It was a difficult search, but eventually we returned with four decks. We sat down and, despite many distractions, we finally pulled together a basic lesson plan by 2 AM. We ended up not learning conventions, and so we only included the basic opening and first response conventions. Two hours later, I went to sleep, slightly pumped for Splash the next day.

And finally we're here. The day of Splash. I wake up at 11, which is fairly characteristic of me on all days absent a roommate telling me to go to class. I realize my class is in an hour and panickedly run to shower. We leave for teacher check in at 11:40 and then go to our classroom. Surprisingly, the class went pretty well. The kids seemed cool, we pretended we knew what we were talking about, and they played some bridge. I won't lie, watching them play was a pretty big morale booster for me. Then the class ended and, minus the free meals and the admin work that I'll describe in a moment, that was Splash for me.

My admin job was to organize food for the kids coming here to take classes. Turns out I procrastinate. Because of this, this fairly simple task caused a decent bit of stress to ESP. It worked out in the end (or probably will, we'll wait to see how lunch tomorrow goes), but I'm not proud of how I handled it. I ended up buying Dominos Pizza for lunch both days and Qdoba for dinner today. I can now say that I have spent several thousands of dollar on food in college.

Edit: One day, we had to go to a general teacher training session (they just told us about logistics pretty much). On this day, Ved woke me up (he thought I might be doing CPC). There, credit awarded =P.

Thoughts

Splash was fun. I enjoyed my class, and overall the event is pretty cool, but to be honest, my participation was not very high. So why did I choose to post on Splash? Because it's a really cool idea, and one that I would be very sad to see die. So why didn't I participate? Well, frankly, because admin work is not what I joined for. I joined because I like teaching, and I like the idea of everyone teaching. But admin work is not related to teaching at all. Now, admin work is necessary obviously, and I certainly helped out as much as I could for HMNT. I feel that HMNT's prep work was more structured and well defined, but at some level I suspect that I might just have been more invested in personally seeing HMNT come through. Either way, in the future I'm gonna focus more on teaching more and better classes.

Final Notes

ESP runs a lot of programs like Splash, and in my opinion this kind of a service is pretty valuable for the local community. Because of this, ESP has been spreading to other schools. In particular, UChicago, Duke, and Stanford have functioning ESPs, and Harvard is currently trying to set one up. If you go to one of these schools, you should look into ESP, if not to help out, then to teach. Even if you don't go to a school with ESP already set up, get a group of kids together who are interested in running something like this and let me know. There's a company called Learning Unlimited, founded by ESP alums, that provides initial funds and supplies (most notably websites) for new ESPs.

Here's to another long posting draught!

~jnub

HMNT

This space reserved for a post on hmnt, from the activities fair in august to the contest yesterday. It's worthwhile to note that in some sense, this is an anniversary, since this blog opened with a post on HMMT last year. Time passes quickly on long and short scales. In other news, goddamn orgo test tomm >_>

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Twas a junking August day, in the year 2009. All the freshmen were flooding the gates of the athletic center on their way to the activities fair. I got in and did the most obvious thing: got a free bag and started loading it with the freebies from all the clubs (anecdotally, most of the freebies I still have hidden in various nooks and crannies in my room). However, I was also aware of which clubs I would definitely take up, which I would definitely avoid (top of this list, anyone? =P), and which ones I might consider as the year went by. And so it happened that Jessica and I reached the non-descript booth next to the Undergraduate Math Association table. The booth was manned by Jacob and other people, and was devoted, as you will undoubtedly be shocked to hear, to promoting HMMT and getting people on the mailing list. In the course of the conversation with Jacob, he asked, "Would you guys be interested in organizing the problem writing for HMNT" or something along those lines.

Perhaps HMNT needs a brief introduction. HMNT, or the Harvard-MIT November Tournament, is HMMT for local Boston school kids. These kids have had little to no experience with math contests, and so this sets the dynamic of HMNT apart from HMMT in a couple of significant ways.

In any case, caught up in the euphoria of being silly frosh and our gradeless state of Pass/No Record, we said that sure, we could do that. Then we moved on through the rest of the fair and went back to Baker.

A couple of days later, we get a somewhat official looking email from Jacob letting us know what exactly we had tentatively accepted. Apparently we were to be the "Problem Czars" for HMNT, and it was our job to actually get the contests written and populated with appropriate problems. Now, being somewhat lazy from second sem senior year and being fully aware of how long it takes to write problems (or get them written), I was wary of continuing, but Jessica insisted that we continue, and so we accepted the position.

Fast forward several weeks of problem sessions. Due to Jacob and Shaunak's checking up on us, we had made sure to keep good track of the problems we had been received from these sessions that could potentially be used for HMNT. Coming into mid-October, we announced that we had enough problems to put together the rounds. This was good, since if we had waited any later, apparently things would have been not so great. We spend a stressful weekend texing up problems, editing mistakes we notice, and putting together what we think is an acceptable contest.

We release the four rounds for proofreading, and within two days we get a response: the problems suck, no joke. Not all of them, sure, but there are way too many problems that are either too hard or too easy, most of them aren't "interesting" (at this point, we really had no idea what that meant), and pretty much all the ones that work need to be revised in one way or another. This was fairly disappointing, though I will admit I had suspected that our problems were not so great >_>. Thus began the massive overhaul phase of this event. Jacob and Shaunak initially took over writing the Guts Round, leaving us the General, Theme, and Team Rounds. However, due to our general inability to recognize/write good problems fast enough, we were eventually left with full responsibility only for the Team Round. We finished this and helped out as much as we could with the other rounds. This whole spectacle took us around 3 weeks of hardcore work and, for me at least, staying up till 4:30 every morning.

Finally, everything is written and ready. We spend the last few days before the contest printing everything, collating stuff, and making sure that everything is all set up. Finally, it's the night before the contest. We've just wrapped up everything, and I'm running over to Baker at 10:30 so I can meet up with friends to watch Star Wars Ep 6. We finish this at around 1 in the morning, and I get to sleep.

The day of the contest arrives. I wake at 4, get ready, and am at Random at 5. We spend the next two or three hours moving random boxes with contests, free stuff, and oh so many bags of goddamn juice from Random to Lobbies 10 and 13, i.e. the place where you register and the place where you eat during HMMT respectively. After this, I'm told to go print out as many copies of guts solutions as I can. This is intermittent task and throughout the day I successfully retrieve maybe 100 copies total. At 9 I go to one of the two test rooms to proctor the General and Theme rounds. I read the little "Welcome to MIT...." speech and, despite my horrible timing skills, we manage to administer these tests alright. Then that's over, I watch the kids scramble to find their proctors for the team round, and then I head back out to go do more guts printing. At some point, Lily calls me and I go over to Stata to help with lunch. I eat lunch, do more printing, and then head over to the Guts Round. Despite not knowing the teams, this was decently fun. I decided to run rapidly up and down the aisles holding an answer sheet (sometimes after actually doing the problems) so as to scare the teams into thinking that some other team was doing absurdly well =P. Unfortunately, Jacob stopped giving me answer sheets after a while. The tournament wrapped up, and as all the kids left, I stood outside the guts auditorium and sold hmmt shirts (we almost sold out!). Then, following cleanup, we had a meeting and talked for a while, and then we all went back to our dorms. By this point it's around 10, so I get back to my room, talk to my neighbor and roommate for a while, plop down on the couch, and I'm out for the night.

Not quite the HMMT I remember, but as always, some things change and some things don't.

~jnub