Interning

The ExplorSchool program under Minnesota Institute for Talented Youth (MITY) organization just finished it's first of two weeks yesterday. I have had SO much fun interning there! I have spent mornings walking to local shops and playgrounds and such with the Aerobic Newspaper class; it is a fun way to get really good exercise and learn the history of places in St. Paul. Yesterday I joined Crimes and Clues class on their trip to the Mall of America where they toured the CSI Exhibit and solved murder mysteries. It was awesome. Oh, and I went to the Pavek Museum with the Aerobic Newspaper class on Thursday morning; the Pavek is a museum that features broadcasting. There were old radios, transmitters and record players, and the students got to see the tour guide send out an SOS signal via a transmitter that was from the same year that the Titanic sunk - 1912! It was SO cool. I learned a few cool things from the tour guide: the gemstone Amber is made from fossilized tree sap, and the first record was designed by Thomas Edison in 1877 and was made of tinfoil! I also watched the students host their very own radio shows! One student from each group made a Breaking News! story, one ran the music/sound controls, two were hosts, and the others were reporters. It was awesome.
Yesterday, on the way back from the CSI exhibit, the teacher of the Crimes and Clues class and I learned that one boy wrote a 28-page story that was fiction, but had to sound real (i.e; it couldn't be about rainbows and unicorns). His was about a criminal foreigner who escaped to the United States and planned to break into the Federal Reserve. This main character was planning with other foreigners about how and when to do it, when he was overheard by two elementary school students. The students went to the police with the information, and after a long chase, the police officers caught the foreigner when he jumped out the window. There was a lot more detail to the story than what I have just written, but I cannot remember it all. It took the MITY student the entire bus ride to tell his teacher and I about his story because he told us ALL of it. It was super interesting; the best part was when he said "I tried to get a floor plan or layout of the Federal Reserve from the internet, but then realized that that was kind of impossible because all the pictures I found had huge X's through them or said 'Classified'."
I think that my favorite part of the day is running the group games after lunch, because it's just me and the students; no curriculum or things that need to be done. It's just a fun break, and the students get to decide what to do.
So yeah, I am having a lot of fun with ExplorSchool. I am really glad that I decided to sign up for it this year, and I am definitely going to again next summer! In other news, I got an email from some Adjunct Action organization; I guess I got on their email list when I signed a petition for Hamline Adjuncts to have their own union. The email I was sent said that they succeeded at forming a union on Friday. I am so happy for them. One of my professors last semester was an adjunct faculty member, as was the professor who led the theatre troupe that I joined towards the end of the year. I was really angry when I heard that they worked just as hard as other professors but were not paid the same. I have to confess that I do not know very much about what it means to be an adjunct, and that I have forgotten a lot of what my professor told me about it, but I am glad that they were able to make a union. They got a lot of resistance from other faculty at Hamline when they proposed this, but I am glad it worked out for them!
That is all for now. Bye until next time!