Reflections on Round One

Tomorrow starts the last week of our project in Los Angeles. Being here and working with the students at Dorsey has been both gratifying and frustrating. I've really enjoyed attempting to understand the student perspective on Mathematics and helping them piece together the fragments of concepts they don't understand. They're generally receptive to my teaching style and I've learned to catch myself when my explanations get overly complex, which is a skill I've probably needed for a while. This project made me realize that so many of the concepts I consider trivial or intuitive are actually constructs created from the combination of many other ideas, and if someone isn't comfortable with all of the building blocks then comprehension will be difficult at best. I've occasionally had to resort to telling the students that the rules in Math are arbitrary and just need to be memorized, but I try to point out the underlying framework whenever possible in the hopes that they'll be able to generalize the material and develop a solid understanding of the root concepts and how they interact. I think my favorite day so far has been when Mrs. Gay gave the students a bunch of triangles and squares to play with and told them to spend their class time trying to prove the Pythagorean theorem. It was really interesting to see them try to play with the ideas they already knew and use them to solve a new class of problem. Speaking of, Mrs. Gay has tried to convince me that I should consider a career teaching high school math and said that she'll miss having my support in her class.

I'm pretty sure I couldn't teach at a high school level though. I feel like I spend a significant amount of time silently fuming at the students that sleep through entire classes, copy off one another, or just flat out refuse to do anything. From my current perspective, I find it almost impossible to comprehend the continual laziness and lack of work ethic so many students demonstrate. I have to continually remind myself that they're all still really young and have a lot of growing up to do, but it's hard to not take offence when the assistance I'm trying to provide is rejected. It's also difficult to repress some of the resentment that comes with feeling like I'm just wasting my time but I know that these kids wouldn't respond well to my typical abrasiveness, so I have to force a positive attitude toward them, regardless of what's going on.

I also find the after school portion of the program rather frustrating. Our site supervisor was initially very unclear about the expectations of the program, so for our first few weeks we just hung out with the kids and had a good time talking and playing games. Something shifted about halfway through the project though, and suddenly we were expected to come up with organized teambuilding and enrichment activities, get them to do educational worksheets, and strictly enforce the rules about not coming and going as they please. As a result, it felt like we had to radically overhaul the culture of the program in a way that most of the students resented. We saw a significant drop in attendance the first few weeks we started doing it, although the increased organization seems to have benefited the students who needed the time after school to do homework. I think attendance seems to be coming back again, but it's still a struggle to get the kids to comply with the program expectations. It also doesn't help that our site supervisor seems more concerned with grants and the quantity of students we work with rather than ensuring that we have a really solid program. There was a day last week when she knew we had someone from an outside organization coming to oversee the program, so she had us talk to students during lunch to ensure they were coming, ordered pizza for everyone, and had them sculpting clay after school, which is a far cry from our usual day. I thought it was wrong of us to try so much harder the one day someone was watching, but it really wasn't worth the effort to point it out.

With both our job and within the team I've feel a bit of a conflict between acting as the person I want to be and the person I actually am. There are days where I'm absolutely determined to like everyone and do as much work as I can regardless of anyone else, but there are also days where I resent everyone else for being lazy or inconsiderate and wish I could lash out and let them have it. I want to be able to be happy and work hard all the time, but that mentality is still rather tiring and isn't something I can maintain indefinitely yet. As a result, I feel myself frequently bouncing up and down between moods, occasionally several times in a week. It also doesn't help that I often feel very alone in my interests, particularly things along the line of my reseach and education. I guess I got very complacent with the community I had back at RIT and forgot that they were far from typical. I do genuinely like everyone on this team, but for the most part they probably aren't the people I'd choose to surround myself with outside of the Ameribubble we live in. I've decided that I'm going to be happy and like everyone unconditonally, which really helps me interact with them on a daily basis. My relationships with everyone on the team are pretty positive. In particular, I feel like Steve and I have a very similar perspective on work ethic and competence and the same twisted sense of humor, Cassie and I don't really have any boundaries between us and can talk about almost anything, and Megan and I like to tease and mess with each other like she was my little sister. Despite my frequent frustration, which is something I'm working to control, I'm happy here as one tenth of Blue 3.