It’s hard to believe that four weeks of Eureka! camp and eight weeks of DukeEngage-Orange Coun have gone by so quickly. It seems like just yesterday that we arrived here and started creating our lesson plans. Yet, we have already taught STEM lessons in paper engineering, biomedical engineering, robotics, and CSI, and have helped teach a variety of health classes and electives. This very last week had a CSI theme, and it was an amazing week to end with! We pretended that a crime had taken place, in which all of the staff were suspects, and the campers had to figure out who the culprit was by examining evidence in STEM classes. Even though I wasn’t guilty, I was still suspected by a lot of the girls, which made the week quite amusing for me. My STEM lesson was the Breakout Box (like a mini escape room), which I thoroughly enjoyed even though it was the most hectic lesson yet. Since we had to come up with all of the puzzles from scratch, Sakura and I had put hours upon hours of work into this class. Therefore, I was most anxious about the success of this class, but most of the girls seemed to really enjoy it! They said they liked the challenge, even if not all of them were able to complete it. In the afternoons, I helped teach the seventh graders how to build trebuchets. It proved to be a bit tricky at times, but I think they learned valuable lessons in physics and data collection.
Though I hope I was able to inspire many of them, I can at least confidently say that they inspired me.
Eurekathon, the end-of-camp celebration, was on Friday. It was a fun event with food, dancing, and a talent show, and was a wonderful way for staff and campers to spend time together outside of a classroom. At the end of the day, all of us from DukeEngage expressed our gratitude for the summer on stage, since we unfortunately won’t be able to see them again next year. The entire event was the definition of bittersweet, and eight weeks ago I definitely would not have expected all of the tears I was going to shed that day. After four weeks of teaching these girls and bonding with them over a spectrum of trivial to serious topics, it was devastating to say a final goodbye to them. Though I hope I was able to inspire many of them, I can at least confidently say that they inspired me. As I learned from the Cross the Line activity we had last week, so many of them deal with very serious issues at home. Yet, they come to camp with a smile on their face, try their best in class, and openly talk and joke with the staff. I vividly remember how rough middle school can be, so the fact that the campers create such a welcoming community for themselves and go out of their way to support their peers made me so proud.
As I’ve learned over the past eight weeks, this DukeEngage program is only partly about teaching STEM. Our roles have been to counteract the negative messages constantly sent by misogynistic stereotyping and societal expectations by giving them the tools they need to be kind to themselves and others, and teach them that they are capable of success in male-dominated fields by giving them the resources they need to demonstrate their intelligence and creativity.
I know that four weeks of camp is such a short time, but I really hope that we and our efforts made an impression on the girls. We put so much energy into our lessons, and hopefully the girls exited the camp with more knowledge than when they entered. If nothing else, I hope they left camp with more confidence in themselves and in their abilities. I was able to witness how much they grew over the duration of camp, from some instances of bullying in the first week to everyone crying and hugging each other as they said goodbye on the last day of camp, so I believe I can confidently say that they were positively impacted by the summer. I know during Cross the Line so many of them said that they don’t believe that they are beautiful or were told that they couldn’t make it, so I truly hope we were successful in conveying to them that each of them is intelligent and unique and strong, and capable of positively contributing to this world. The problems of girls their ages are so often trivialized by society when they are constantly described as melodramatic, but their self-confidence has been severely and negatively influenced by stereotypes, gender roles, and sometimes even their own families. As I’ve learned over the past eight weeks, this DukeEngage program is only partly about teaching STEM. Our roles have been to counteract the negative messages constantly sent by misogynistic stereotyping and societal expectations by giving them the tools they need to be kind to themselves and others, and teach them that they are capable of success in male-dominated fields by giving them the resources they need to demonstrate their intelligence and creativity.
If my previous blog posts haven’t already demonstrated so, this DukeEngage experience has had such a profound effect on me. I’ve gained confidence in myself and my abilities by managing a classroom and helping the girls build such a large variety of projects. I’ve learned how to be more assertive, how to keep calm even as concrete plans fail, how to communicate with several groups of people, and how to teach with confidence. Although DukeEngage only lasted for eight weeks (and camp for only half of that), the lessons I’ve learned, the experiences I’ve had, and the friendships I’ve made will surely follow me for years.