The challenges I face at MOSI

Since it's been 3 weeks of teaching now at MOSI, I can now make some observations about the challenges I face there while teaching. Oddly enough, it's not the kids themselves that I find challenging, especially since I have experience teaching in low-income neighborhoods before teaching these kids. It's other various unnecessary things, some beyond my control, others not.

The first and most important challenge I faced was writing my week long curriculum. The first thing that made this challenging was the lack of detailed information about what the class should be about. I don't think this was a mistake on MOSI's part (although I don't agree with their methodology) as I was told during the interview that teachers are expected to write the entire class curriculum and that the entire class itself was at the discretion of the teacher. Now, this wouldn't have been so hard had the mini class descriptions we were given had been far more detailed. For example, I had one class description for an online web design class for kids that mentioned using animation, music, and photography to make a web site, and the more and more I read it, the less sense it made. I simply cannot find the correlation between animation, music, photography and web design! Of course, you can make animation, music, and photography and put those things on your website, but these skills do little to aid in the actual design and creation of a website. I tried all these things, actually, and found out the the kids JUST wanted to make a website. All that extra stuff was just getting in the way of doing that. Funny huh?

The second part that made teaching challenging was the fact that I had the kids for 6 hours (7 minus lunch). I had to teach them something.... for 6 hours straight?! At first, I didn't realize how odd it was, but once put into practice, you start to see the insanity of it. I was trying to keep them occupied every hour, but no matter what lessons I threw at them, they finished it within an hour and didn't want to go back and do it again. Of course, I could have made them do it again, but this is camp, not school. I didn't want them to be miserable and bored, ya know? I started to think about it, and I was wondering if the problem was me, maybe my lessons and curriculum were really just not that good, and then I realized something important: wait, in any school, in any class, and any grade level is no teacher made to teach the same subject for 6 hours straight! Your math, English, computer, art, science, etc are all taught for about 45 minutes to an hour and a half each, depending on the school schedule, and often by different teachers. In college, the max is 3 hours, but those are for work classes, in which the professor teaches for the first hour and then allows the students to work the rest of the time on their work, and as adults, we have the ability to focus that long without needing more work from our professors. So now, it's got me wondering... what if MOSI is the one doing it wrong? Well, apparently, they have been doing this for 30 years, so perhaps they aren't and I really am just making bad curricula... I wish I knew, because I honestly am trying to be a better teacher. It's my career goal, after all. I want to improve...

And finally, I had some serious technology problems that I wasn't sure whether it was my fault or not (although I was told that it wasn't). I was given very old and very ancient mini mac computers for the kids. The OS on these machines haven't been upgraded since they first got them. Some of them had the very first version of firefox! Woah (and in case you didn't know, firefox has about 13 versions of their web browser out now, so that's a whole lotta upgrading that was not done to these macs).  Some didn't even have flash and others were hooked up to those huge CRT monitors that I didn't even think a place like MOSI would still have. Honestly, it felt like me and my class got the poop end of the stick here. I felt belittled and angry. MOSI did have a set of ASUS gamer republic laptops, and I knew this because I've used them in previous classes before. So I wondered, why am I not using those? I was told the week before I could, so might as well forget these garbage mini macs and go back to the PCs. To make the long story short, I had trouble getting those PCs for my class for reasons I am still unsure of, but when I spoke to my directors about it, they told me that I should be allowed to use them and no one should tell me otherwise. I got them for one whole day after that and that was it.... still not sure I understand why. Honestly, I am still wondering why those PCs were not reserved for my class (those kids parents PAID for them to be there after all). And I don't understand why I was expected to use old mini macs that had software issues up the butt and why I had to do countless amounts of IT work on them just to make them somewhat okay to use when they apparently had an IT guy... I still don't get it, and I wish it was better explained to me. I just wanted to teach the kids something.... Funny thing is, that one day that I got the laptop PCs for the whole day was the most productive, for the kids, in the entire week. They got so much work done... it's sad that they were not allowed to use them again...


Despite the issues I had, I am not unhappy about my experience. Every challenge I face I am grateful for, because that is just something new I can now handle in the future. I now know more about macs then I ever did before, and I I know a little more about IT stuff than before. So I learned a little something in this process to. The only thing I wish I could have had was some information... I just wanted to know what in the world was going on so I didn't have to constantly wonder. 


On top of that, the kids were still amazing. They were fully capable, they were interested, and they were kind. They were unbelievably chatty and they seem to have an obsession for computer games, but despite that, they made it all so worth it. Children are such beautiful human beings, they express so much happiness and joy that sometimes I forget human beings, child and adult alike, are capable of such happiness and kindness.