Today was my 2nd day of our Young Writer's Camp. A colleague and I are team-teaching a two week Myth and Fairytales unit to a mixed group of middle & high schoolers. They're extraordinary kids. Sadly, only the cream of the crop would sign up to spend two weeks of their summer in a classroom writing.
The course is taught at a local university. I had the expectation that because it's a well-funded, private university, that we'd have proper facilities. Nope. Today it got up to about 95 degrees (it is August, after all). And of course, no air conditioning. We have a small, crappy box fan that I propped up in the back to cool 29 sweaty little bodies. Yesterday they brought us a broken upright fan. As we were desperate, we used it. We had to put it up on a chair, however, because the head of the fan was broken and dangling sideways. The only way for us to create any circulation was to turn it on to medium, as high and low didn't function, prop it up on a chair, and hope for the best.
It fell on a student who inadvertently touched it while stretching. It bruised his little hand.
I opened the windows first thing this morning in the vain hope that some of the cool morning air might waft in and provide some much-needed relief from the staggering heat. I think it just caught the heat radiating from the already hot roof of the building below us. But the windows are complicated old devices, and I could not reach the lever to close them. I left them open.
It was fine until the students were presenting summaries of their creation myths. Once the students started presenting in their shy, quiet, brilliant little voices, the maintenance guys started using a jackhammer on the sidewalk outside. And I'm not kidding; I couldn't make this shit up. We adjusted, and they continued presenting. When the last kid was talking, somebody else picked up a chainsaw & started trimming trees.
When it was time for them to compose their own myths, I decided to send them out of the horrid room & into cooler air. The rest of the building has A/C. The offices have A/C. 29 brilliant young kids dispersed within the building and out on the lawn to write quietly. It was pristine. Well, until I gathered them all up and realized one was missing. Nobody had seen her. So I managed a lesson while my colleague frantically searched the building for our errant child. 10 minutes pass, 20 minutes pass, a half hour, and nothing. She's vanished. I begin doing the worst-case scenarios. My colleague takes over teaching the lesson, and I proceed to check the building. At the end of class, 45 minutes have passed, and we're nearing a panic. The university is right downtown; any psycho could have nabbed her; what if she's having a medical emergency, passed out or bleeding profusely somewhere; what the hell are we gonna tell her parents?
Finally, after we've alerted all the staff and we're all subtly panicking, the child emerges from a stairwell. Apparently, she had been so engaged in her writing that she didn't notice 45 minutes had passed, and that's on top of the 30 minutes we gave to write.
It's never just teaching. It's never just an educator in a room full of kids going about their day. It's ALWAYS something.
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ReplyDelete(Sorry--I accidentally deleted my first comment.) I love this post! I laughed aloud several times because, yes, it IS always something. Good teachers find ways to navigate all the odds, as you did, and still manage to reflect on it good-naturedly later. Glad the kiddo was okay!
ReplyDeleteThank you, s. That was one rough day, and though I can smile about it today, I did need a couple of glasses of wine that night.
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