Teaching is Stories

Here is a quick description of my job:

I arrive at camp (school) and there is a smart group of high school folks, high school grads, and college students who are playing counselors for the week.  I have about 4 hours to teach them my lesson plan for the forest field study.  If they were simply helping me in a classroom, this would seem like a good amount of time.  However, my field study is a hike through the coastal forest in which each counselor will teach about 80% of my field study.  This is necessary because taking 30 kids on a trail and teaching to all of them at once is obviously an impossible task.  So...

I find the easiest way to teach my lesson plan to the counselors is making as much of the material as possible into stories.  We have the "lichen" story, the "hemlock" story, the "succession" story, and some others that are both short and long.  Most counselors will have a much easier time remembering a story which highlights a lesson than remembering some list of scientific facts.  Because of this little discovery, which I'm sure has been made a million times before, I am going to do my best to compile a group of stories which will hopefully cover the majority of my field study topics.  The key is to make them simple enough to remember while also being able to expand and include details during or after the story.

In other news, my first week teaching at outdoor school went swimmingly.  I had a fabulous group of counselors working with me, a few of which had been counselors before and were real help.  The students were from Klamath Falls and were so eager to learn I'm afraid that students in the coming weeks will pale in comparison.  I suspect that they are similar to students everywhere with their wide eyes and curious minds.  I am excited to continue designing my lesson plan to make our studies run more smoothly for weeks to come.

Now, I need to worry about remembering how to play and sing some songs on my guitar and how to tuck a homesick child into bed.