Harry vs... the middle schoolers

[sniffnoy]

Originally the entry of this title was going to be written on Monday. I never got around to writing it until today, though, so you won't have to hear me complain about how bad my day was.

So my mom had insisted I get some sort of job this summer. Naturally, not really thinking about the outside world during the school year, I had made no efforts to do so during the year except sending in a last-minute counselor application to PROMYS.

Well, short story shorter, I'm now working for Mr. Holbrook at his "math camp". And I'm in the room with the 7th and 8th graders.

Well, we have managed to find ways to keep the students busy, so now, combined with the influence of a girl working here named Katy, who has had to deal with kids this age before, the past two days they've actually been relatively well-behaved. The first day, though, was a disaster.

After starting them off with an AMC 8, we didn't know what to do. Mr. Holbrook had the idea of giving them all different years so they couldn't copy off each other, but that also meant we couldn't take up time by going over the answers. We had nothing else to give them, nothing else Mr. Holbrook wanted us to do... what do we do now? Lecture? About what? Well, how about what Mr. Holbrook is doing in the other room, number bases and modular arithmetic? And so I got up, completely unprepared to speak at all, much less to 7th and 8th graders who will have a hard time following me, and began to completely lose nearly everyone in the room. And of course they were so completely lost they didn't even ask any questions. Not that I probably could have answered them well I was so disorganized. At one point a kid name Vlad claimed he could explain it better. After much badness, I finally decided to see if he actually could. He couldn't, of course, so now... blech. Thankfully eventually Katy arrived and was able to restore order. She wasn't there the next day, when it was also pretty bad, but thankfully we didn't run into the nothing-to-do disaster again.

In cool stuff, we had one kids, Alex Graham, who is apparently in 3rd grade (!) who we moved up to the 9th graders room not only because he wanted quiet so he could actually work, but also because he got a 138 on an AMC 10! Craziness.

...yeah, back when this was going to be an entry about how bad my first day was, I probably had an ending in mind, but I don't anymore. So that's all.

-Sniffnoy

Comments

[jonpin.livejournal.com]

Ah, you're filling my shoes? I did as much the last two years and thought I might be doing so this year before reneging. I'm surprised Holbrook's suggestion wasn't a massive does of AoPS. I used lunchtime games of Mafia to keep them calm, but eventually it backfired as they wanted non-lunchtime games of Mafia as well. The last week mostly consisted of me teaching probability through poker.

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

That's what the 9th graders are doing; for these kids, we have various packets on specific topics. AoPS might be a good idea if we ever have nothing to do again, though.