I'm not going to lie to you. Institute sort of blows. I average 4-5 hours of sleep/night because our days start around 5:30am and don't end until all of our work is done.
Now, let's do a little thought experiment...
Imagine the most Obsessive-Compulsive, hyper-organized, uptight, headstrong, Type A person you have ever met. Now imagine that 800 of THAT person were plucked from their home, transplanted to super-humid Philadelphia, deprived of sleep, fed crappy dorm food, and given massive amounts of work to do... in GROUPS of three other people just like them. Now, to take it a step further, let's put those smelly, sticky, unnerved, hungry, overtired balls of sunshine on cheese wagon school buses each morning at the crack of dawn. Drive them to schools. Put them in their groups, throw in some more work, just to push them a liiitle closer to the edge.... and stand back and watch what happens. Welcome to Insitute. My professors and TAs at Madison would beat me if they saw me use this cliche, but can we say, "Too many cooks in the kitchen!" Everyone here has always gotten their way. They have always been the leader of their groups, the caller of all the shots, the go-getters among their peers. But they can't work together to save their lives. So this has been challenging.
I shouldn't make it sound all bad. I actually really like my group members as people. I think they're awesome, and we get along quite well, for the most part. (Better than most, I hear.) But when you're working together from 6am-midnight, and you're all "born leaders," some issues are bound to arise. We're working through them, but we're all guitly of shrinking patience and growing intolerance as the hours wear on and the work mounts.
Anyway. That's Institute. It's five weeks of mental insanity and physical self-abuse, and I've completed one of them. Yeah me.
More importantly..... TOMORROW IS MY FIRST DAY OF ACTUAL TEACHING!!!!!!!!
We get our Philly summer school students tomorrow. 15-20 eighth graders who have 19 half-days with our teams of 4 teachers/class. (math, reading, writing, science) 19 days to learn enough to move on to high school. Crazy. I am so incredibly excited to see the faces behind all this work. I trust meeting my students will make it all worthwhile. I'm giddy and nervous. But I should get some sleep.
(My apologies for the limited posts. I hope to write more as time allows!)
