This is Breakthrough

Last summer, I got hired for a teaching internship called Breakthrough Collaborative, and I came back for this summer. In brief, Breakthrough is a nationwide internship ship that hires high school students and undergraduates to become teachers to rising 7th, 8th, and 9th graders. We teach them in core subjects of math, science, literature, and writing, and we offer other various electives. Teachers are everything that certified teachers are minus the degree. We design our own lesson plans, write our own homework assignments and tests, grade all the papers, and manage our own classes. Besides the academics, a huge part of Breakthrough is our co-curriculum, community building, and just hella fun and connecting with the students.

Breakthrough is not like traditional summer school that kids go to when they need to get credits or make up for some class that they failed. It’s basically just enrichment for low-income, high potential students. Breakthrough offers a fun and positive learning environment that otherwise isn’t available to students during the school year. Generally, the students want to be there. From what I recall about my current location, Breakthrough Silicon Valley (BTSV) (previously known as Breakthrough San Jose), hundreds of kids from four different middle schools applied, but the directors could only take in a little less than 130 students. (And at BTSV, we have 27ish teachers I think.)

Ok, I think that’s enough background info. It’s background info that really tells nothing about what Breakthrough is about (no simple “background info” can), but enough to give you an idea of the kind of skeleton that Breakthrough operates with.

Anyway, we don’t get to work with the kids until next week. (We teach the students for six weeks total.) All of this week is training, and today was the first day. All I can really say is, I’m really fucking excited for next week. I don’t know why. I feel like I should be deathly afraid for my life. This summer I’m committing myself to twice as much shit as I did last summer. Last summer, I taught two classes of seventh grade writing, two-ish weeks of dance, and spent one week working on the year(summer)book. This year, I am doing: (it’s so much more extreme that I’m using bullet points to emphasize the craziness)
- 3 classes of eighth grade writing.
- An entire 6 weeks of dance.
- Planning out the daily all-school meetings for pretty much the entire 6 weeks.
- Spending the last week planning our big-ass celebration night.

Not to mention:
- Unlike last year, I actually plan on grading my students’ work this time. I was already pretty stressed out and had a lot of shit to do last year without grading their stuff, and now not only will I grade all their shit (I WILL DAMN IT), I have an extra class to grade.
- I have the class roster for this summer, and I can see that I already know 80% of my students, and they know me. Last summer, I gave myself a reputation of a(n overly) lenient teacher, and this summer, I need to destroy that reputation and maintain a hardass and strict attitude (with fun) all summer long. For all three classes.
(- Trung is working the same internship. This isn’t a problem, but it will create some interesting situations. We plan to be totally professional at work (it’s hard for me to not call him “Trungy” and for him to not call me “Dino”), but the kids have already been suspecting something since last summer (another story for another entry). So this summer they’re going to be digging for clues and answers. These kids are smart; they aren’t blind to what goes on among the teachers.)

So yeah, I should be freaking out. I should be crying in anticipation of how much sleep I will not get. But for some reason, I’m not freaking out. I’m just really excited. I think it’s because I think of this summer as a second opportunity to fix all my mess-ups from last summer, and my excitement is coming from my confidence to fulfill (a good portion of) everything I’m setting out to do this summer.

And as for the structure of my dance class, it’s getting changed for a bit. I’ll discuss that another time because I’m trying to keep certain types of blog entries from going over a certain limit. This is one of those certain types. Plus, it’s 10 PM, and I should really be getting ready for bed. Yes, I need to sleep that early. Every night if I don’t want to be sleep deprived (or if I just want to enjoy sleep whenever I can). Oh gaaaaaaaawwwd.