I have worked with teaching kids for almost four years. I originally started out teaching Sunday school when I was 13 and have been doing that consistently ever since. I then got an amazing job during the summer where I got to be a teaching assistant for a day-camp called the Children’s School of Science. This camp is in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and spans for six weeks during the summer. I grew up going there, just as I grew up going to Sunday school, and I ended up slipping into the role of teacher easily in both cases. I found that knowing the flow of how to work with kids in these settings made me good at these jobs, and a genuine help to the actual adult teachers. The flow was easy for me to find too, seeing as I went directly from being a kid getting taught, to doing the teaching.
In this Science School job last summer, I felt like I truly learned how to work with kids. I found that they had specific quirks, which I hadn’t picked up on during my once-a-week exposure to them in a teaching setting. But after working five days a week with them, I felt like I really understood how to handle these quirks, and how to incorporate them into my teaching style. Some of the things I learned that summer will continue to help me throughout my life.
I am going to continue to do this teaching job during the coming summer, and I am very excited. It will be interesting to do it again, having already spent a whole summer doing the same job. I will go into it with experience, and a different outlook than I went into it with last summer. During the school year, I will continue to learn more and more from the kids at Sunday School. This year especially, I have been challenged more with children who have special needs and require specific things from the teachers around them.
At my two different jobs with kids, I teach very different content. In one of them I teach Hebrew and religious studies, and in the other I teach science. The science classes I taught last summer spanned from geology to marine biology, with lots of field trips and hands-on experiences during all of them. So, clearly the themes that I am teaching about are wildly different between the two jobs. But I had a similar amount of knowledge in both of these fields, so it felt similarly easy to teach about them.
Out of all of my new experiences as a teenager, these two jobs have been some of the most fulfilling. I feel like I learned so many new skills from these, and they will help me in the long run. I have gained social skills and leadership skills which will serve me well in the future and have served me well up until now. I hope to continue to work with kids throughout the next couple of years and learn as much as I can.
