I was a Boy Scout from sixth to tenth grade. Don’t laugh. When I was in eighth grade, we had an activity where we learned how to measure the length of a river in footsteps, using only a compass and a pen/paper for arithmetic. I typically had a lot of trouble with math, but as I would discover on this outing and during later science classes, I was much better at the math when all of the numbers had quantities that I could reason with to check myself, and weren’t just empty stick drawings. Standing by a freezing river, I was curious how in the world we would do this let alone without a calculator, as my patrol leader explained to all of us that we would need to pick a spot perfectly across the river that we could see from down the bank in some direction, like a tree or something. I had known that this would have something to do with shapes, so I thought maybe that distance would be the side of a shape. I recalled from geometry that we could use the lengths of the sides of a shape to predict the sidelength of others. Maybe we would construct a regular polygon so all of the sides were the same length? I typically have a lot of trouble following verbal instructions, particularly when I am outside distracted by nature, so I spaced out trying to solve the problem on my own. We split up into partnerships to find the width. I was paired with Will. He asked me, “were you listening? I have no idea how to do this.” That made two of us. But we knew that we had compasses, and we reasoned that by looking at them we could see when things were due north of us, as well as due east, or 5 degrees north of northeast for that matter, by using the 360 degree markings on the compass housing. The lightbulb went off in my head. “Dude! What do we know about right isosceles triangles? They’re isosceles, so the two legs are the same length, we don’t care about the hypotenuse. And they’re right triangles, so to trace the path of the leg of one, all we would have to do is walk directly to the left or right when we’re facing perfectly towards the opposite end, so we should pick which direction we walk in based on where the river curves so we don’t fall in. And we’ll know we reached the end of the leg when the direction of the tree on the other side is 45 degrees away from the direction it’s in right now. Then, the width of the river is as long as the leg we just walked! We don’t even need paper!” So we tried my method and found that the river was like 30 feet long. The point of this was so that we knew how much rope we would need to cross it. We measured thirty-eight feet of paracord to be cautious, and tied one end to a tree branch on our side. Then, we tied a baseball-sized stone to the other end, and lobbed it across so it would hook onto a branch. We made sure to lob it high, so that it would fall down and loop around the branch five or six times and be secure enough for us to put weight on it. Ideally, we would have used a clove hitch like we did for the branch on our side, which would have been abundantly secure, but obviously we would first need to cross the river to tie any kind of knot, so the loops would have to do. Now that we had a line going across the river, we could cross it. It was very shallow at this point, and there were enough ice spots and stones that if we were careful we would not get our feet wet. Although if we fell in, it would have meant our gloves and pants would have been soaked in freezing water, so we would not take a chance. Luckily, we had our line going across it, so I crossed the river, walking on ice and stones and holding onto the rope. I made it across in safety and tied a clove hitch on the branch, so now we had a safe way to cross a freezing river, no bridge required. It was so cool.

In the classroom, I watched a tutor help a boy with a history assignment. He needed to describe the significance of a series of labor reforms that were made in the Progressive Era. The tutor had been a history major in college, so he knew what all of the terms were. He started by describing some of the reforms in his own words for the student, but in a conversational tone. The student responded well to this, he was clearly interesting in the history that they were talking about and he didn’t take it as if he were being spoonfed the answers he should write down. The student responded to the tutor giving more information, his information relying on the scaffolding of the tutor’s but still giving valid points. Then, the tutor removed the scaffolding by reinforcing what the student gave, encouraging the student to write what he had said himself.

I think working in the Academic support center is all about making yourself an MKO.  When I’m with the students, sometimes I ask what they’re working on in general rather than if there’s anything specific they need help with. If there’s something they say that relates to material I feel comfortable with, I ask “How’s this aspect of this class going? You’re learning kinematics in physics! Do you see the significance of initial and final position and velocity with the kinematic equations?” and sometimes they say “Oh, I was having trouble with that, let’s talk about it!” and then I hope my knowledge diffuses to them through our conversation.

The students in the academic support center seem generally enthusiastic about their classes and like they want to learn. There are some students that have tended look at their phones for the entire period and not write or type anything, and for them I wonder what coming to class means. But for the students that are more talkative, I find that their conversations are always either directly related to their classes, or just “smart conversations” meaning discussing sophisticated topics. They remind me of my friends from when I was in high school, but I think the ones at NHS consistently have better conversations than my friends did.

I had an experience working with two students who asked for help with the same assignment. One was very engaged, and was able to commence and move through the assignment after about one minute of my talking them through it. The other was polite and acted appreciative, but much less responsive and didn’t complete the assignment with me. It’s possible that gender-related differences, differences in learning style, and other things that were going on in the students’ lives caused them to respond differently in the moment to my teaching. But thinking back on it I feel a sense of accomplishment regardless, I didn’t “only reach one of the students with my teaching” I reached both of them to some extent and now I have the experience and know to experiment more to reach the other one more than I had. Maybe try slowing down my pace or condensing my explanations to be less pedantic. But anything teachers do, they shouldn’t be so critical on themselves. This cartoon taken from reddit.com/r/wholesomememes reminds me of this experience. We can all learn a thing from the inchworm!