Standard+6


 * TEACHING STANDARD #6 ** : Demonstrates involvement in student life.

//** We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” **// --John F. Kennedy

Doing extra or trying something outside one's bailiwick takes a great deal of effort and commitment--it takes especially extra energy and confidence. At the end of last school year, I jumped into cold water, so to speak, when I volunteered to take on the rocketry after school activity. My after-school and co-curricular activities over the last decade have included coaching high school forensics (impromptu), judo, Yang style tai qi, middle school Model United Nations (MUN), Roots and Shoots, line dancing, and an online magazine. The rocketry ASA was my first co-curricular activity that was concerned with hands-on building things and blasting them off. The closest I ever came to such a thing was at my previous school where I assisted one of the sixth grade teachers with a science unit on forces and motion that culminated in launches of very different kinds of rockets. This time round, I was the leader--a very different position. I have been well supported all three trimesters by volunteers from the U.S. Air Force.

This school year I also took an opportunity of our school's fantastic community of people of all ages by wading further into the high school pool. For much of the year, I had a high school assistant/trainee from the Building Blocks program. She worked with me as much as twice a week for one elementary school class period each time. She would work with one child or as many as three at a table and working with them on specific tasks such as adding dialogue to a realistic fiction composition, talking about an experience with literature or capturing on paper the sights, sounds, smells, and feelings during a garden visit.

I had the good fortune of having been chosen to chaperone one of the largest service trips in ASD history. The trip included a beautification project at Honeywell schools in Sichuan, China and visits to various cultural sites. I took the risk last spring of throwing my hat in the ring and received the good news at the beginning of this school year. This spring, I spent my school holiday with 77 high school students and about 15 chaperones. I was responsible for monitoring the students, taking head counts, early morning and late evening bed checks, liaising with the tour guide and bus driver, handling medical issues, and keeping track of dispensed over-the-counter medications. One very special job I had was interpreting English to Chinese/Chinese to English. Most of my interpreting was simple phrases such as "Where is the washroom?" "Please bring a fork/knife/spoon" and "What is in this dish of food?" At the same time, it was no small feat. Among the folks on my bus was a family with two ASD elementary school students, and when they wanted white rice, they wanted white rice. In fact, at one restaurant, because of my rudimentary Chinese, my table got the last of the rice! (I know, we were in a Chinese restaurant in China, and the restaurant ran out of rice. We all thought it was //qiguai--//strange--too.) Interpreting wasn't the easiest job, and at times the locals couldn't catch what I was saying and I couldn't always catch what they were saying. However, when push came to shove, when a student lost a passport in an airport, when students were sick and in search of the nearest washroom, and when folks had certain dietary concerns, my language skills came in handy. The experience made my weekly exercises in humility with my Chinese teacher worth the effort.

In addition to the aforementioned events and activities, I have continued my usual work with students and parents offering special sessions on various aspects of the curriculum. Near the beginning of the year, I helped a parent understand how she and her child's tutor might use "Squeepers" (Survey, Question, Predict, Read, Respond, Summarize) as a reading comprehension "package" that might help her child's reading comprehension of English and Danish literature.





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