About a month ago I was hired on at Mad Science as an after school instructor. Mad Science is a company which provides science based after school classes, in classroom workshops, and birthday parties to elementary students. The objective is more focused on getting and keeping kids interested in science as well as teaching them some content.
Being a Mad Scientist I needed to create an alter ego, my Mad Scientist name. Pulling on a geology pun I coined myself Professor Gneiss (pronounced "nice"). The joke is a little bit above most the students, but the kindergartners just adore my name.
My first season with after school classes has finished. It was trying at times with one of my classess. Everyone seemed to be friends, so if students were getting too chatty or disruptive relocation wouldn't resolve anything. Being after school class I do expect things to be a bit more chaotic.
Apparently I was impressive enough to be asked to conduct birthday parties over the summer. I did my first in class workshop with a class of 30 kindergartners at a charter school. Anecdotal reports from my coworkers is that the worst students seem to come from private and charter schools, and I was told that this school was "a tough one." Being kindergarten also had me worry; I've never delt with that many form that age group before. to top it off the teacher was also going to be in the classroom. I will be judged!
They were very well behaved, better behaved than either of my after school classes. I was also very impressed with how well they remembered the key concepts I was teaching: white light is made up of all the color lights, things that glow is called fluorescence, and the colors we see are the color light that thing doesn't like.
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