Part of it being winter here means that there are fewer social activities happening, as I have mentioned. This is even true for indoor activities like trivia (attendance-wise). This week at one of our trivias (we have two that we go back and forth between now, since one of the trivias is more accessible to our friends who had a kid) there were only five teams. That went decently well for us and we came in second. A few weeks ago our other trivia only had four teams and I was able to win some stuff there too. Sometimes, on rare occasions, showing up really is half the battle. I love it except for the fact that trivia hosts look so sad and feel like they have personally failed somehow.
In other news...
My last two days of work have been the kind where I literally have a different class each hour throughout the day. On the one hand, it's tricky to be constantly adjusting to a new group throughout the day and sometimes having to come up with plans on the fly. On the other, there are (even more-so than usual) no longterm problems if something is not going great. What's that, kid with behavioral problems? I only have to put up with you interrupting me for a few more minutes? I have all the patience in the world.
Today, one of my hours was with a 6th grade classroom where students were working in groups to create some kind of electronic structure. They literally had to wire the circuits and build everything from scratch; the non-electronic features essentially being made out of recycled cardboard or plastic. We never did anything like this when I was in 6th grade. My initial thought before actually working with the kids was, "Please don't put me in charge of impressionable young people wielding hot glue guns and live wires. I don't want to write incident reports all afternoon", but it was actually really impressive and they showed some maturity. One group made a robot with glowing eyes, another made a traffic light, another made a lighthouse model, etc.
My last class of the day was to teach 5th graders how to do caricatures for Art, which also ended up being pretty fun. I drew one of me throwing a frisbee on the board as an example, and now I'm regretting not taking a picture of it.
After my post workday workout, I got dinner to go from Roll'd, my favorite Vietnamese takeaway franchise here.
Good times.
When I was in 6th grade, we had some projects with circuits/electronics, but we mostly used these pre-made circuit card things that attached to each other with little screws (and you could attach wires and lightbulbs, etc, to them the same way). And we were mostly just given very simple assignments to build ("Build a circuit with a battery that lights up the bulb"). There was usually only one right answer and basically no creativity involved. I kinda wish we'd had more of a free-building assignment like that at some point.
ReplyDeleteThat's pretty cool. I guess now with all this focus on STEM and teaching kids pre-coding kind of knowledge, there may be more projects like this.
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