One hot summer day in Texas, I made my way into the classroom where I was teaching robotics to a group of middle-school students. Given the fact that I am pursuing a Ph.D. in history, that might seem surprising. Rest assured that I was surprised, too.
I was even more surprised by the fact that I was one week into a three-week robotics class, and that I had survived despite the absence of the robot-building kits, which had yet to arrive. The nonappearance of said kits was the reason that I walked into the room with giant rolls of tinfoil in hand, told my students that we were making human robots, and promised that the losers would have to wear any poorly imagined robot costumes to lunch. They loved it.
I had originally been hired by a summer camp for gifted kids to teach its swimming class. I applied for the job after my first year of graduate school because I wasn't far enough along in my program to do research, because I needed a M.A. to teach summer courses at local community colleges, because it was a job that promised to give me most of the summer for reading, and because I wanted some extra money. I was hired because I knew how to teach swimming. But it turned out the camp had extra courses available, and was willing to pay by the course. I jumped at the offer.
The program demanded that instructors focus on student-driven learning, rather than becoming a "sage on the stage." We weren't allowed to assign a lot of homework. There were no final exams, only final projects. I walked in each day not knowing exactly how those 90 minutes were going to play out, and then I repeated that feeling three more times in three different classes until my day was over.
It was scary and exhilarating—and reinforced my urge to teach.
After three years of teaching at nerd camp (and I say that affectionately, as a self-proclaimed nerd), I had not only taught swimming but also learned to run classes on artificial intelligence, camouflage, fantasy fiction, food, robotics, and spying. It turned out that whether I was teaching swimming, robotics, writing, or food, and whether my students were 9 or 17 years old, I was always thinking about teaching and how I was going to use the things I'd done in those classrooms in my future college-level history classes.
I know that there's no substitute for having taught college-age students when one is applying for a college teaching job. But here's the thing: My graduate program allows only very advanced students to teach their own courses, and I have been absent from Texas because I have won residential writing fellowships. So these summer classes are some of the experiences I'm working with when I think about pedagogy, and how I teach.
And it turns out that I really do think that a lot of the skills that I've learned are transferrable. I have had to relinquish the need to completely control the classroom; I've had to think on my feet; I've had to recognize that each student learns differently; and I've had to allow myself to laugh at my failures and successes alike.
Not that I'll be able to talk about some of those experiences when I'm on the job market this coming year. I'm sure that no job candidate, when asked to describe her most difficult teaching experience, would reveal that a student had gotten a little too excited on dry land while learning the undulating hip movements of the butterfly kick (it suddenly became absolutely necessary for all of the students to jump back into the water immediately to start learning the arm motions).
I'm sure that the majority of job candidates whose students are ADHD don't know it, because their students stay on their meds during the school year. Anyway, what student nowadays doesn't seem permanently distracted by so many minimized windows on the laptops they bring to lecture? But the disruptive students, the know-it-alls, the brilliant slackers who don't turn in work, the not-so-brilliant slackers who don't show up, and the grade grubbers alike don't intimidate me, because the students I taught at nerd camp were all of those things.
Gifted students thirst for information, but they need help focusing, shaping arguments, and sometimes connecting emotionally to their peers. Most college-age students have achieved that last goal, but they, too, need help balancing demanding schedules and doing more than regurgitating information.
There were hurdles, of course. Sometimes swimming was my hardest class of the day, because it was something that I could do and had been doing since I was 2 years old. Once I became a TA, I ran into similar problems. Historians know how to craft an argument and write a paper, but it can be difficult teaching undergraduates how to do it because we have internalized the process of writing. Having to use three different ways to help a camper complete a flip turn reaffirmed the idea that my history students might not learn or understand things the same way that I do.
I had to physically get into the water and break down my own flip turn into a number of steps that a beginning swimmer could follow. Similarly, I now "write" history essays out loud in the classroom, so that my students get to see how I'm thinking about primary sources, and weaving them into a larger argument. I've realized that I need to put metaphorical water wings on my history students before I can expect them to complete the equivalent of a 200-yard butterfly.
My camp classes also taught me the art of improvisation. Turning my students into robots was one joyful discovery made in the face of absent supplies. I acquired yet more flexibility when I planned a lesson on catching and camouflaging insects only to realize that there were no bugs to be found. A side note: If you were on campus at the University of Texas at Austin and found yourself being followed by a small child who then attempted to "camouflage" herself, I apologize—but only halfheartedly, because it was very amusing to watch.
In my food class, I wanted to take my students to the grocery store so that we could start to talk about advertising, food labeling, and processed foods. There wasn't time, however, to get to and from a grocery store, so instead, I took my campers to a chain drugstore nearby. Within two minutes they'd cornered the man stocking the food aisle, and he was explaining to them why all the foods at their height looked especially delicious and appealing. Being tied so closely to the campus wasn't a bad thing, after all; when we got a last-minute tour of one of the dorm kitchens, I could see my students peering into a gigantic deep fryer and questioning the tater tots we all ate for lunch.
As I've extended such teaching moments to the history classroom, I've discovered that my most fruitful class sessions occur when I don't try so hard to plan out every moment. After too many test-review sessions where I felt as if I was spoon-feeding information from lectures, I came to a review meeting with 50 different key words and only a vague idea of what to do with them. I ended up writing each keyword term out separately on a very large strip of paper and gave each group of students a handful of terms.
Then, each group—one group at a time—had to lay their terms out on the floor. I encouraged them to rearrange the words as they saw fit, and then we spent another 10 minutes labeling each set of terms. In another 10 minutes the students had a group of thematic ideas that they could use to study.
After they wrote sample exam questions, my students discovered that they could answer the questions by picking and choosing terms from the floor. They began to see pieces of history as evidence that they could use to make arguments, but also that the arguments they made were different from those of their peers.
That lesson plan is now one of my staples, but I didn't come up with it until after I'd taught at nerd camp. I had to acquire the courage to sit back and let the students run the classroom.
Camp teaching was important for me mentally, as well. Especially after my first year of graduate school, when I needed a break from reading, reading, reading all the time, my three weeks working with kids forced me to stop taking life so seriously. I enjoyed putting the smallest students I had into the largest T-shirts I could find and having them swim T-shirt relays across the pool. I loved watching students create theme parks based on their favorite books of fantasy fiction. I reveled in cafeteria lunches of chicken fingers and ice-cream sandwiches (perhaps too many ice-cream sandwiches).
I suppose that what I'm saying is that for first- and second-year graduate students looking ahead to a summer of no income, teaching at a summer program might be just the thing. There is nothing wrong with wanting to get ahead in your coursework, or in fine-tuning an article for publication—indeed, you should be doing those things by a certain point.
But there is also nothing wrong with pursuing an opportunity that seemingly falls outside the purview of your graduate work, because you might find yourself unexpectedly enthusiastic about teaching and robotics.
