Very odd start to the day today. Perhaps preventable, perhaps not. Got me off on the wrong foot though. Even though actually the day turned into an opportunity for me to flex into how good I am at presentation, it started with me mistaking a high ranking engineering volunteer for a totally clueless teacher. She didn’t have a DBS and she was alone in the room when I was brought to her, so I just thought she was a teacher. Meanwhile the teacher had been told not to bother us, apparently for some reason… Very sweet older lady and absolutely clueless with tech, the teacher. Very nice. But pudding.
All I needed was to know whether or not it was gonna be possible to run a PowerPoint that had been emailed to the school. They couldn’t let my usb connect to their network. They wouldn’t let external laptops and usb sticks connect. Schools sometimes get hacked and shut down, believe it or not.
So I spoke to the highly skilled volunteer like they were the remedial idiot teacher who hadn’t done the basics, and it likely triggered all of her stuff about men my age talking down to her. Every other time I’ve done this, the person on their own in the classroom was the fecking teacher. I thought she hadn’t done the basics. She was on her own in classroom in a school with, allegedly, strict safeguarding. Easy to make that assumption as normally it is really carefully enforced. Damn. And it is the last one of the season.
I ended up with my high ranking engineer volunteers seeing me live running the options when I realised the tech was not gonna happen. Ok fuck so we haven’t got the tech… How is this gonna run?
I do lots of these workshops so without some sort of prompt I didn’t know for certain which one I’m running now. I had a hunch (which was correct) but I didn’t want to be doing balloon rockets when it’s Stations …
One of the volunteers kept on saying “We can just run a map of the facility and show them what it looks like, I’ve done that before.” This is year 9 and year 10. For two fucking hours? They would have been eaten alive.
I managed to work out which workshop was running today, which was all I needed to be sure of. That known, I just started, slides be damned. I don’t know what the teacher was doing, she was trying to take the register by stealth. I had no clue when they were done with admin and I could start.
So I took a moment to brief the volunteers – I would have had much longer had I not had all the needless tech fuckery. “You’re gonna be running your stations for twenty minutes and I’ll get to them quickly so I can see if we can sort this tech thing,” I told them. “Twenty minutes doesn’t sound like much but if you go too quickly you’ll run out of material and it’ll feel like you’re there forever.” “Yes yes yes they said and I felt it not landing.” I didn’t have time to reinforce it.
One of them never stopped running out of material completely after ten minutes. He did it six times. I tried to give him some tips. “Don’t just show them how to do it first time, let them make mistakes and correct!” Nope. He slightly improved but he still always had a long hang at the end where he just literally clocked out, turned his back and started washing stuff up. (!) All the kids in his group were asking “so what’s next?”. It was painful.
The other two got good at it, they were more experienced engineers and older, but still… I could see them running out. Even the big boss. “Just invent a natural disaster for them,” I tried. It’s a task about balancing. Tell them they HAVE to break one of the limits, carbon or budget. Let them decide which. Then teach them how breaking carbon will effect budget…
Twenty minutes with year 9 and 10 – you bloody well have to be creative. There are ways to make all the stations fun learning experiences for much longer than that twenty minutes, but … I’m learning more and more that that’s a skill I’ve got that is about being slightly irreverent to the material , and responsive. I will extend the interests and lessons case by case. “Why do you think that bubble happened in the balloon?” is so much deeper in potentia than “that wasn’t supposed to happen. That’s bad balloon design”, which I heard today with a huge teaching opportunity missed.
I’m not a teacher. But today I’ve remembered that I would be good at it even though I know for fucking sure I’ll never do it cos I don’t want to teach people who don’t want to learn, I need variety, I can’t be arsed with blowing smoke up the arse of idiots and even though I like to try to inspire the youth to be the best versions of themselves, they mostly annoy the fuck out of me.
AlBarclay 