It's summer!

The very last part of the academic year for me was to work at the English language summer camp put on by the school’s English department.  The camp is designed for students finishing grades K-6, and our job was to work with individual classes (mine had sixteen fifth and sixth graders) on arts, crafts, science experiments, and make sure they got to daily sessions with other counselors (fitness, swimming, art, music, and dance).  A few takeaways from this:

1.  Fifth and sixth graders are the SLOWEST walkers in the history of the world.  Seriously.  My 15-month-old niece could probably move more quickly than them.

2.  Despite claiming to have common sense and the ability to use it, students of that age group should NEVER be trusted to use anything related to fire, lest they start a fire in their art class using a candle, used matches, and the paper from a crayon.

3.  Greek school lunches are far superior to any other school lunch.

4.  Primary education is not even remotely close to what I should be teaching.

Yay summer!

 Above and below:  projects the students worked on during certain parts of the camp.

Of course, no summer camp would be complete without a moose.

"It's the FINAL COUNTDOWN"

It occurs to me that I haven’t really written much about the school itself.  Well, there’s a reason for this: it’s not all that different from a U.S. school.  Now, before you start throwing stuff at me for lying to you, let me justify this argument:

SIMILARITY:  Students take the same types of classes (math, science, social studies, literature, music, English, ancient Greek and Latin.

DIFFERENCE:  Just about all of these classes are taught in Greek.  Surprise!

SIMILARITY:  Students get just excited about Christmas and Easter  breaks as we do.

DIFFERENCE:  Students dread their end-of-year tests much more than we do.

On that last point, I want to share with you a bit about why students live in terror of these tests.  You see, it’s not just a final exam like we know.  Our finals are packed in to about three days at the end of the semester; their finals are spread across a 4-week period, and the scores they receive on these tests carry the same weight for college admissions as the ACT or SAT do for us.  Talk about high stakes testing.  Students, particularly the seniors, stop showing up at school for the last three weeks or so because that time is more valuable for them to be studying independently than to be in class.  Makes for some pretty small (i.e. 0) class sizes.

During the testing period, the school is on LOCKDOWN.  Seriously… we are not allowed in a 30 meter radius of the school building, and security takes this perimeter very seriously.

"Tresspassing forbidden.  Violators will be shot"
Not really, but it's a much better sign that way.
And most of you can't call me out for a bad translation, anyway.

Now with the intensity of these exams, you’d probably expect the Greeks to have a fool-proof way to secure the integrity of the tests.  You’re right – they do.  Let me give you an example for the English exams*.  The writing prompts are decided between sundown and sunrise the morning of the test, and the questions are released to the schools about 30 minutes before the scheduled start of the school day.  It’s hard to cheat when the test writers don’t even know what the writing topic will be, eh?

Oh, Greece…

*This is based on hearsay.  I have no reason to doubt that it’s true, but don’t quote me on it.

Forensics... and not the murder mystery kind.

One of the big parts of my job this year was to work with the forensics (speech and debate) team for our school.  Yeah, yeah, I know I’m a nerd… it’s hard to break away from it all, though!  In fact, I think this year marked my 10-year anniversary of beginning speech-related activities!  Crazy.

Anyhow, the program in Greece shares many similarities to that in Minnesota.  I have never done debate, but I found some striking similarities to mock trial, so it really felt like a natural bridge to cross.  We had around 60 high school debaters that I worked with at different points throughout the year, as well as a group of 16 middle school students that I worked with for about two hours every Tuesday.  Oh yes, middle school students in a class-like setting after a full school day.  That brought back all kinds of great memories.

I also worked with the speech portion of the team, specifically with persuasive speeches.  These kids were fun to work with, taking on topics such as poverty, privacy, perfectionism, phones, and many other.  All of this culminated with the Panhellenic Forensics Association Tournament, hosted at our school for teams from 18 schools across the country.  This four-day tournament and the planning of it kept me at school late into the night in February and March, but it paid off in the end.  We won the team trophy, and we were the only school with finalists in every event!  Not too bad!

Oops.

Guess I forgot about this for a while.  My bad.  Well, you're in luck now, because I'm about to give you an UNPRECEDENTED amount of posts in a short amount of time.  Actually, that's probably not even true (see November 2010)... but the point is I'm going to create, for your reading and viewing pleasure, enough posts to give me cover for another three months.

And so it begins...