Summer School is Here!

Summer school has officially started, and the atmosphere in the office is much more lively, fun, and noisy. I have yet to begin working with "my" group of students, as I am still needed in the office while we get things running. However, I still get a good glimpse of what having so many students from a wide age range entails. For example, a kindergarten student was sent in the office because he was crying and did not want to do work. This may sound uneventful, but if you consider that I have never interacted with children for more than a few minutes, it was quite an event. The child was crying non-stop and refused to do his work, claiming that he missed his mother and that he wanted to go home. One of the volunteers sat with the boy and tried for about 10 minutes to calm him down, but it was near useless. I couldn't believe the task of relaxing the child could be so difficult, so I tried to help and soon realized that it wasn't as easy as it looks. Although I will not be working directly with that young of an age group, I will help them on occasion, and I am excited to see what I learn. I also had to fix my first mistake today, unfortunately. I put some excel sheets together earlier this week (Excel is a new program for me), and when I changed the order to be alphabetical, I didn't notice that some other data was rearranged as well. As a result, teachers got attendance sheets that were not accurate, and when I realized what had happened, I had to re-do all of the sheets. I couldn't believe I had made such a big mistake and worse, that I had to fix it. The good news is that I learned from that error and now I know how to rearrange the Excel sheet without having the same problem. Whether it be from personal interactions or with technology, I am learning new things and I'm very excited.