Internship is back!!!!!!!!!!
I love nearly everything about my job, but the two things I love most are seeing my students run an exhibition event, and visiting them at their internships. The past two Tuesdays have been good to me. Last Tuesday was our book launch, and this Tuesday is the first day of exhibition visits!
I started the day by visiting Aaron and his mentor, Gilad Hoffman, at the Beth Israel Congregation in University City. At our meeting, Aaron rattled off a list of duties ranging from analyzing school attendance trends designing a seasonal display for the preschool, but his most important duty, which will form the core of his internship project, will be to design and organize eight major events for the Congregation's youth group events next year. You can read more about Aaron's internship on his internship blog here.
I love nearly everything about my job, but the two things I love most are seeing my students run an exhibition event, and visiting them at their internships. The past two Tuesdays have been good to me. Last Tuesday was our book launch, and this Tuesday is the first day of exhibition visits!
I started the day by visiting Aaron and his mentor, Gilad Hoffman, at the Beth Israel Congregation in University City. At our meeting, Aaron rattled off a list of duties ranging from analyzing school attendance trends designing a seasonal display for the preschool, but his most important duty, which will form the core of his internship project, will be to design and organize eight major events for the Congregation's youth group events next year. You can read more about Aaron's internship on his internship blog here.
Next, I headed to Mira Mesa, where Avery is interning with Michael Kadie, who got his start building an electric race car, and is now building battery management systems for all types of electric vehicles. The problem with current battery management systems, as Michael explained to me, is that they drain too much power (the analogy that occurs to me here is if your laptop battery got drained by the lights that indicate how much charge it has). Right now, Avery is helping Michael to make and test circuit boards that will manage lithium batteries in Spinergy electric wheelchairs While I was there, Avery was hand-assembling and baking (yes, literally baking) circuit boards. You can read more on Avery's internship blog here.
Just a bit further south, I visited Sydney at the Playwrights Project, which hosts an annual competition for young playwrights. Sydney is producing a promotional video for the project over the next four weeks, which right now means looking at a huge amount of archival footage from past shows. She's also working on this year's competition but she won't be evaluating any submissions - there is a conflict of interest because she has submitted her own play to the competition! You can read more on Sydney's internship blog, here.
I ended the day at visiting Brittany, who's interning with Kerry Ferguson, who teaches kindergarten at an amazing school that I knew nothing about before today - the John Muir School, where students pursue extended projects based on Paideia, an approach to education developed by philosopher and educator Mortimer Adler. It sounds awesome, and I want to learn more about it. The class is halfway through an eight-week project called "The Barnyard Moosical", and right now the classroom has eggs in an incubator which are due to hatch tomorrow. Brittany is creating a webpage to document the full process using photos, text, and video. I was so excited about all this that I completely forgot to take a photo of Brittany and Kerry, but you can read more about Brittany's internship on her blog, here.