My Summer School Teaching Experience

I went to a private school from 5th grade to high school graduation. Fortunately for me, I never really had to deal with the public school system. I used to say that often, but I never really understood what I meant by it. I just figured that since I went to a private school, I was probably better off than most. Now that I have done some work within the public school system, I am completely astonished at how accurate I was.

This summer, I worked for Scott Middle School in Hammond, Indiana as a tutor for their summer school program through 21st Century Scholars. I expected to be somewhat of a teacher's aide and to help the students with their math and English work that the teacher would assign. The students in the program all had failed at least one section of the ISTEP, which is the standardized test that Indiana uses in its public school system. I figured that the job would be fairly easy, but still a bit more intellectually challenging than my previous summer employment at a department store. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.

The first week on the job was supposed to be for training. Unfortunately, the lead teachers (the two people in the program who actually worked at the school and had teaching degrees) were so busy making phone calls and trying to find a place to actually hold classes (the actual school I was working for had to be shut down for the summer for "cleaning") that we received absolutely no training whatsoever. I spent most of the week playing chess with another of the tutors.

The second week was devoted to organizing and creating lesson plans. Of the dozen or so tutors in the program, only three were studying education. I was not one of them. A lead teacher came to me on the second day of that week and told me to create a lesson plan for 7th grade math. Not only had I never created a lesson plan in my life, but also I was not provided with anything but their textbook. "Just look through there and pick out stuff you think will be fun for them," she told me as she handed me the book and walked away. Thankfully, we did not use my lesson plans. Trust me, they would have been completely useless. However, I do not believe that the lead teachers even realized that someone else took over for me and I spent the rest of the week stapling worksheets together and taking materials to the site (about 5 miles away from the school) we were having classes at, the Hammond Area Career Center. Two weeks later, we were moved again to Purdue University Calumet.

Finally, the third week began. I was now extremely well prepared for tutoring the students due to my full week of training and thorough examination of the lesson plans. After quite a bit of confusion concerning which rooms were ours and which belonged to the other two middle schools using the building, we finally got started. The 6th grade students were in a room around the corner from where I was, with the 7th graders. Since there were two lead teachers, you would think that each would take a class and begin teaching. That is certainly what I thought. Instead, the lead teachers did no teaching whatsoever. They took turns on which days they would come in (due to poor budgeting, the program could not afford to pay both of them on the same day), and all they did was walk back and forth between the classes, making sure we tutors were doing their jobs.

I was responsible for four students. I was not their tutor, as I had expected to be, but their teacher. Other than for science class and enrichment activities (organized activities at the end of each day such as chess, lego robotics, and scrapbooking), I was completely in charge of their entire summer education. I chose what to teach, since the lesson plans were abandoned by all of us once by the second or third day of teaching, and I taught it. Each of the five groups of 7th grade students was on a different schedule, doing different work. It was easy to see that none of the three new tutors knew what we were doing, and the two tutors who had worked in the program before were too busy with their students to help us out. Thankfully, my students liked me by the end of the program, unlike the other two tutors' students. Since we had no training, we did not know how to deal with bad behavior. One of them handled bad behavior by literally threatening violence. The other would get into childish arguments with the students. Instead of understanding that he was in a role of authority (although that was not in our job description), he let them walk all over him. Honestly, I can say that I do not know how I would have handled it because I was lucky enough that my students were fairly well behaved.

All this time that we spent trying to figure out what it was we were supposed to be doing should have been spent preparing the students for the ISTEP. Although I do not agree with using standardized testing as the sole means for determining a student's progress for school, this was what I was hired for and should have been trained to do. Instead, I drudged through useless worksheets with titles like Adding Integers or Undertanding Similes with the students while they constantly asked why they had to be there and told me that they wanted to go home. So did I. I am ashamed to say that many of the students in this program are no more prepared for the ISTEP than they were at the beginning of the summer. Poor budgeting, apathetic lead teachers, untrained tutors, and overall disorganization are to blame. I have even less confidence in our public school system than I did to begin with. I cannot say that I completely regret taking this job, but I will say that it was a huge diappointment, and now I find it easy to see why so many students drop out of school.