U.S. Campus Life The teachers arrive By Masako Yamada	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
高校教師のための夏季研修会始まる コンピューターを頻繁に使うこの研修会では、各地から集まったさまざまな年齢の高校教員たちが2人一組で作業を行なっている

For the past couple of months, I have been helping plan a summer workshop for high-school teachers. Now, the teachers have arrived and the two-week workshop has begun. The focus of the workshop is computer simulations of molecules, and I've been helping with the scientific planning. This has been quite challenging. My colleagues and I continued to edit the problems and solutions until right before the workshop began.

Many other people have been involved in the planning, including education professors, high-school teachers, computer support staff, administrative assistants and graduate students.

It takes an amazing amount of work to run such a workshop. Even after the workshop began, we were scrambling to make photocopies of this or that. There is a lot of important information to distribute: lecture lists, staff lists, lists of participants, maps, list of local restaurants and local events. On the day before the workshop, one of the physics professors and I were still busily inserting information into large binders. It's not a glamorous task, but somebody had to do it.

This workshop is a serious event involving a great deal of planning and a great deal of money. It can't be merely interesting or fun. The teachers are being paid a stipend for attending, and they also get graduate school credits to further their career. It is expected — or hoped — that the high-school teachers apply what they learn to their own classroom teaching.

We know that computer simulations can't replace real-life experiments, so we've planned a lot of "wet labs" (actual experiments) in addition to computer work. Hopefully, we have been able to show that simulations can make the wet labs easier to understand. In any case, it's fun to manipulate real flasks and thermometers and liquid nitrogen once in a while.

The high-school teachers also attend seminars on pedagogy by education professors and seminars on research by science professors. At the end of the day, the high-school teachers type their feedback and thoughts onto an online discussion board. The schedule is tightly packed from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. every day.

My colleagues and I have been doing our best to fill every session with useful content, but sometimes the task seems overwhelming. The manager of the group then tells us to relax. He says the teachers are thrilled to be here. Indeed, judging by the looks on the teachers' faces, I can tell that most of them are actually happy to be at this workshop. It's probably impossible for them to absorb all of the classroom information since we are covering so much material in such a short period of time, but they know they can always go back and review the material we've given them.

I suppose it's fair to say that the teachers are here to do a bit of schoolwork, a bit of networking and a bit of sightseeing. They have the evenings and weekends free, and they seem to have been enjoying themselves. I myself have enjoyed getting to know them during off hours. I know that they have been planning their own get-togethers and events, and I've even been invited to one of their parties.

There is a wide range of ages among the teachers, from 23 years old to over 60 years old. There is also a wide range of teaching experience: Some teachers teach in poor rural areas, others at inner-city schools, and others in affluent suburbs. Some of them have worked as engineers or bankers before switching to teaching.

I've been surprised that most of them seem to get along with each other quite well in spite of this. It's probably because they have a common commitment to teaching science to high-school students, and a common sense of adventure. They want to learn something new to incorporate into their teaching.

For the time being, I'm pleased with how the workshop has been progressing. I can't let go of my breath yet, though. After this two-week workshop is over, these high-school teachers will leave, but a new crop of teachers will be coming a week later. We are sponsoring the same workshop twice this summer. I'm confident the second session will run more smoothly, based on our experiences with the first session, but there is still a lot of work to do.

Shukan ST: July 19, 2002

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