Remember my ‘other’ job? I’m sure I mentioned before how much I love it. If such a thing exists, I’m born a teacher. And this is another example of why it’s so great.
You might not expect it, but we make crazy hours sometimes. Parents nights ‘till nine in the evening, when we’ve been teaching all day too, are not rare. And once a year we also come to school on a Saturday. On the Open Day. This of course, to present ourselves to potential new students and give them an idea of what it’s like to learn at our college. Naturally, this is a lot of fun, and that’s not just me being biased! Proof for this claim comes from the fact my current students were so terrific.
First of all, they are not obligated to come to school in their weekends and they don’t get extra points or anything either. I simply asked who’d like to have an extra biology lesson on Saturday and then practice some skills we’d been doing the last semester, but in a smaller group. And with visitors looking at us. I’m proud* to say lots of hands were raised.
* Of them, for being so enthusiastic about learning. And of myself; I must be doing something right if they want to learn from me.
Our current students helping out on an open day is a win-win situation really. Visitors know they’ll get the honest story from them and in the meantime the students practice lots of skills. And for me, it meant I didn’t really need to do much in the end, but smile and enjoy the kids taking over. They suggested experiments and – after my approval of this – they set them up themselves and told visitors all about it with a genuine spark for the subject. And on top of this, they’d already cleaned everything up, before I even had the chance to ask. This does bring across the nice atmosphere in which we work every day.
One of the things we did, was taking a closer look at the kind of fungus that typically grows on peppers. Fungus is really not just ‘yuk’ you know. (I’ll probably share some close-ups soon too). We also investigated the contents of a bird’s pellet and compared the found pieces of mice skeletons to the human skeleton figure in class we call Harry: “Oh wow, look, mice really do have the same vertebral notches as us, just tiny ones!” And in the last picture (when scrolling down) you can see Naomi (front) showing where the aorta starts in a real sheep’s heart, while Lisa is telling visitors it’s really not scary stuff (as it’s not really a heart of a naughty student) and Serena is putting together the heart model. I foresee brilliant futures for these girls, said the still proud teacher.
And this is just what happened in the biology class room. My lovely colleagues were each doing their own cool thing with help from other students. I really do work at the nicest school in the area.
