For someone who had never intended to make a career of working with children, I seem to be looping back around to just that. As part of my internship with the Center for Global Studies this semester, I run an afterschool club on World Drama at the Young Scholars of Central Pennsylvania Charter School. At this point, all of the interns are involved with the Extended Day program at the school, with Katie and Matt running a French club, and Casey working on World Drama with me. The interns also rotate to assist with “World Stories Alive: Tales in Many Tongues,” a multi-lingual storytime that takes place nearly every Saturday at State College’s Schlow Library (click here to view schedule).
Our duties at World Stories Alive tend to be fairly simple–a welcome fact for this lazy twenty-year-old on a Saturday morning. We hand out papers, sporadically and frantically take a headcount, set out crafts, and practice our chair-stacking skills. I don’t mean to brag, but I think I will be qualified enough to put the chair-stacking on my resume pretty soon. We also help with the crafts as needed. Our greatest challenge so far was probably the Spanish day craft, ojos de dios, which involves a lot of yarn-winding. The presenter also did not bring an example, so Casey’s and my fooling around with string in the back of the room was actually rather useful. The kids were actually more adept than we were in this case, and I felt like we were more frequently asked to help the parents to navigate the in’s and out’s of the craft. The most difficult task of the day was probably convincing an eighteen-month-old that she could not, in fact, eat the entire role of yarn (you have to take one mouthful at a time, like spaghetti).
Like I said, World Stories Alive is a pretty straightforward assignment. We offer help as needed, and we get to interact with cute children. They are especially cute because they are with their parents. The classroom is a different place entirely.
My younger sister is going to be a teacher. She is among those lucky few who have had their career roughly sketched out since the sixth grade; there have been revisions, sure, and she still has not chosen a college–but she is going to be a teacher. I am still figuring out my next academic year. Scratch that. I am still figuring out the details of my next month in college, and the career plan is still in its early stages of development. Through all of this process, though, ‘teacher’ has never reached top ranking among the options.
In a way, teaching would make sense for me; if someone prompts me to discuss the public education system, they need only push ‘start’ and then run for cover as the rant begins. Thanks to a couple excellent history and English teachers in high school, I also become strangely excited about certain subjects. Don’t even get me started on Catherine de Medici, portrayals of the Bible’s Eve, or barricades in the streets of Paris.
Even when I have considered the idea of teaching, I imagine myself in a high school classroom — never elementary school. And yet, my list of job experiences includes office staff at a swim club; arts & crafts leader at the same swim club; leader at an annual children’s drama clinic; assistant at children’s swim team events; classroom assistant at a preschool summer camp; and cashier at a children’s clothing store.
My sister insists that I am afraid of children, which is clearly not true. I do, however, recognize the potential for them to stack themselves up and build a transformer-like monster to overthrow classroom order…figuratively speaking…
My World Drama club intimidated me more than anything else associated with this internship. I had helped in classrooms before, but this was the first time that I would be in charge of a classroom on my own. In the end, I was lucky enough to get Casey McAlpin into the classroom with me; I cannot thank her enough for her help.
After worrying about just keeping the classroom under control, there is the whole question of a lesson plan. I have become used to adults involved with the program asking me, “World Drama, okay…So what are you…going to do?” Well. My goal is to focus on a different region of the world and a different aspect of theatre each week, until we finally begin working on a short play to perform at YSCP’s Extended Day Extravaganza at the end of April. So far, we have talked about theatre in ancient Greece and made masks; we’ve learned about African storytelling traditions and created our own stories as a group; and we’ve talked about using body language to tell a story, and looked at dance performance in Mexico. I like to use as many images and videos as possible, and we try to get the kids moving when we can; Casey does a great job of keeping the kids engaged with questions, and vocabulary words. All the cool kids are saying bailar and compañero this week.
If there is one thing that dealing with children reminds you though, it is that kids are smart. They pick things up quickly, and will absolutely say the ‘darnedest’ things. So sometimes, I feel like I have to play their game. Week 1 involved the following dialogue:
“So what do you think we’re going to do in a World Drama Club?”
“STAR WARS.”
“Not quite–”
“WHY NOT?”
“Because we’re looking at our world, not a galaxy far, far away.”
All things considered, the clubs have been going relatively well! My first group is made up of kindergardeners and first graders, while the second session includes third through fifth grade. If you can catch their attention–be it with something funny, something they’re interested in, or something just entirely foreign to this small town in central PA–they are engaged. And by the way the two groups have been trading off the claim on ‘Most Likely to Randomly Start Dancing or Pantomiming Star Wars,” I don’t expect to ever see a dull week at YSCP. I have to wonder whether I am the one learning more in these classrooms, though.