What did I accomplish?

[learnteach]

It's true that teaching is mostly thankless drudgery, in the respect that there's no daily "aha" wins, and a lot of the time, your actual accomplishment cannot be measured. It's like weeding the garden every day--if you don't accomplish your task, things still grow, just not as well.

I was at a meeting for the Summer Tech Camp I teach at, this being probably the last one (many reasons), and one of the other teachers noted that a past student of the Robotics course wanted to come back and assist. I welcome this; it's always good to have more help, it's great to relearn old material, and the experience of coming back helps the other students.

This particular student was so inspired by the open-endedness of robotics and the fun of it that he has gone on to more robotics, so the class was a success. More than I had hoped.

As was pointed out, probably by Dave Orphal, teaching the facts is not enough. And teaching enthusiasm is what I want to do.

July 11th, I teach the next session of Robotics.

Comments

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Yes, this.

Also, I think teachers can't always know how the ripples go. My dad was a teacher and he occasionally, years later, had students tell him that he had made history interesting for them and sent them on a lifelong path of reading history, when he hadn't the faintest awareness of that student, in class, as being more engaged than others. If you see what I mean.

[kahnegabs.livejournal.com]

One of the wonderful things about teaching in the same general area where I live, is that I run into former students or parents of former students quite often. They always seem to recognize me. I love having them tell me of their success stories and how much they got out of class years ago. Once in awhile one will even send me a note about it. Most kids do appreciate what we do, I think, it's just not cool to tell the teacher about it while they are still in school.

[rustmon.livejournal.com]

:)