Today I learned how to teach more efficiently...
We woke up at 6:45 am, had some breakfast at Rob and Anne’s house (our host)
We went to the place where the learning festival was going to be: The Boys and Girls Club of Denver. We had to start our workshop at 10am, and we arrived by 8am. We had to plan how we were going to teach because we only had 2 rooms and it was going to be difficult to set up just two workshops at a time in just 3 times slots. Some of us would have only done 1 workshop the whole day if we stuck to our original schedule.
We voted and decided that workshops were going to be an hour long and we had to adjust all the workshops to fit an hour so that everyone could do at least 2 workshops in the day.
It was an interesting experience of organization because I had to condense my part of the workshop in neuroscience into 25 min and that was hard. The brain is too complex to summarize the basics of the neuroscience in that small amount of time. However, Evan and I did well on grasping the fundamental parts of our workshop by discussing what we wanted the students to take from the workshops and how to make it easier and shorter to explain our ultimate goals.
We learned a lot about time management and how to be concise.
On another note, I really admire the work of boys and girls club. It was amazing to see how the facilitators could organize so many kids and give them space to be creative, to read, to learn, and to have fun. I consider this kind of places as fundamental to form communities and keep children away from bad influences in their free time. Also, I would love to point out that managing that many children is a task that requires patience and tolerance, and now that I have had the experience with groups of students, I am astonished by the effort of people who work with big groups of children. They are people who I genuinely admire.
Here are some pictures of that day:
Thank you for reading!
I'll see you later on another post :)
-Edgardo