Teaching

It's summer break here now and the university doesn't pay me for this time so I've found myself a summer job. I'm teaching forensic science to high school kids through a program called Upward Bound. It's specifically for students from disadvantaged backgrounds: 2/3 both come from low income families and neither of their parents have a tertiary education; the remaining 1/3 either come from low income families or neither parent has had tertiary education. The kids all stay on campus and have lessons and other activities.

This means that they have some very... creative given names. "Kahlúa" gets double points for being both a registered trademark and alcoholic (makes me thing that Cointreau or Drambuie might be good names for a boy, or Sambucca for a girl!). "Xotchil" is the most difficult to pronounce. There's also a couple of names with capital letters in the middle but, believe it or not, that's not so rare here in Bloomington, e.g. Cindy has taken classes with a TreVor.

So far it's been a bit of a challenge, behaviour-wise. Lots of talking and quite a bit of sleeping in class. There was also one incident with a student following his class-mate around the room while discreetly holding a retort-stand by his side. When I approached they both sat down and pretended nothing was going on. When I took the retort-stand from him and let him know how serious the situation was, he explained, "But that's my cousin!" Well, I must admit, I have a cousin who I've tried to kill before but I'm glad I didn't.

Anyway, as part of this program (which is federally funded) they are given a weekly allowance of $20. But if they do anything wrong, the teachers deduct money, e.g. late to class is $2 and disrespect is $5. And there is a tutor assigned to the class who keeps track of all misbehaviour and reports it. Luckily she's a no-nonsense sort of person who let's them know when they're out of line.