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