Summer Bridge: A Teacher’s Perspective
By Jonathan Dec ’13
I will be honest, I came to Princeton-Blairstown in August slightly disgruntled. Mid-August is a crucial time for teachers to prepare for the upcoming year, and I had planned to use that week to finalize my curriculum and get my classroom ready. I had just finished my first year of teaching, which was (by definition) rough, and I was looking forward to a chance to sit down and think about how to plan my classes before the students arrived. I’m a curriculumcentric teacher - I believe that the heart of good teaching is a good lesson. When I found out that I would be spending a week in the woods instead of at my laptop, I felt frustrated.
race, and our responsibilities as men in today’s world. I’d wanted to discuss those topics with my students in a safe space for a long time. Pinpointing cause-and-effect in education is difficult, so it’s hard to say exactly how the trip “changed” my relationship with students. What I can say, though, is that the trip reminded me of some important lessons I’d forgotten in the day-to-day grind of first-year teaching. During our ecology class in the creek one day, I heard a scream coming from one of my more excitable students. “It’s a snake!” he yelled, pointing at something in the water. I began reassuring everyone that the brown line in the creek was just a stick, only to watch it slither away in the middle of my sentence. After a challenging first year of teaching, I needed to be reminded of something that now seems obvious: the importance of trusting my students and valuing their perceptions of the world.
It’s been more than two months now since we returned from PBC, and in hindsight, I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to go. I often fall into the trap of prioritizing lesson planning and instruction over building relationships with students, so I think I needed that week in the woods more than I realized. I spent the week with a group of roughly 10 boys and A Summer Bridge participant collects water from Bass Lake to anaanother chaperone, climbing rock lyze as part of the STEM learning experience. walls, dissecting owl pellets, roasting marshmallows, and pickI did lose a week of planning time to the woods, but ing up (or not picking up) bugs in the river. My favorite part of now that we’re in the doldrums of October, I think the trip the trip was the daily reading block, when my group would did more for my teaching than any amount of time spent gather in the PBC library to read and discuss a coming-of-age perfecting a year-long calendar. Seeing my students as “just novel about a boy growing up in modern-day Bed-Stuy. There, people” outside the classroom was a powerful experience surrounded by a collection of yellowed classics and wildlife for me, and I hope that they left the trip with the sense that guides, with the doors left wide open to the pond, we had a I am human, too. series of deeply personal conversations about masculinity,
REUNIONS 2015 On Saturday, May 30th PBC was proud to host a breakfast meet-up during Reunions at Murray-Dodge Hall. It was great to see former and current staff and board as well as friends of the Center including Priscilla Hayes ’75 and her husband Pete, Chris Van Buren ’84, Sarah Tantillo ’87, Bruce Petersen ’79, Rev. Fred Borsch ’57, Ev Pinneo ‘48, Rev. David McAlpin ’50 and his daughter Janet, Daphne Thomas Jones ’77 and her sisters Ivy McKinney ’77 and Evora Thomas ’74, Dean Alison Boden, Chris Shepherd ’98, Kirsten Hund Blair ’84, Sari Chang Guthrie ’84, Julie Polhemus ’95 and husband Chris Jones ’95, Isabel McGinty *82, Marina Murvanidze Mitchell *98, Kevin C. Hudson ’97, Jackie Alexander ’84, Ed Seliga ’75 and his wife Debbie, Jane Fremon ’75, Misha Simmonds ’97 and his family, Jason Griffith ’95 and his family, Dr. Hunter Wood ’60, and Al Kaemmerlen ’62. Also in attendance were Mark Antin-PBC Board Chair, Tim Downs-PBC Trustee, and Pam Gregory-PBC President & CEO. Rev. David McAlpin ’50 (left) and his daughter Janet McAlpin join PBC Board Chair Mark Antin in Murray-Dodge Hall during Reunions.
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