By Roopsha D Bandopadhyay

I was introduced to MIT’s ESP events through teaching for HSSP over the summer. I was excited by the prospect of teaching anything, literally anything, to high school students who were eager to learn. The same enthusiasm compelled me to teach a sequence course for Spark this spring. Out of the near-infinite topics I could choose from, why plants? I think it was a combination of things: the fact that ​I grew up with a forest in my backyard and I loved looking at what flora accompanied me on my daily walks, the fact that my room currently looks (and smells!) like a greenhouse and I have no intention of lessening it, and the fact that being in nature is an ideal socially-distanced and relatively accessible activity suited for the warming weather.

As is the case with many other subjects that live in Zoom in the looming shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, plants are particularly tricky to learn about online. Everything from their morphology to habitat and ecology either requires or is greatly enhanced by in-person attention and study. A testament to this is how botanists (pre-pandemic, of course) frequently travel to different biomes all over the world to collect and characterize plants through field work. While I will not claim to have enough funding to send my students on such expeditions, I do think a simple plant hunt in MIT’s Killian Court would have revealed what can exist even in heavily urban environments.

To attempt to recreate this experience, I created a “virtual plant hunt” in the form of a PowerPoint. I hid very small pictures of twenty-five different plant species in slides of seven different settings that resemble environments in Massachusetts. When my students found a plant, they would click on it to reveal the plant’s “information slide.” It contained a larger picture similar to what could be examined in-person and details that could be readily gathered from the field, such as plant height; branching pattern; and leaf color, shape, and texture. My students would then “take a picture” (screenshot) and use this information to catalogue the plant species in a digital laboratory notebook.

I was overjoyed to learn that my students could identify a hornwort and a yellow jewelweed plant from this hunt! They did so by using concepts about the morphology of different groups of plants I introduced in a previous class. This was my favorite part about teaching: I could engage interest in a fascinating topic with hope that my students could continue to learn about it even after the course ended. Although future plant hunts, be they professional or amateur, will be in-person, I will always remember hunting for plants through PowerPoint.

By Nancy Xu

I had never imagined that I would be teaching an online class for middle school students before being asked (peer pressured?) to do so by my childhood friend, Hilary, one of the current directors of Spark. It has been more than a year since my last in-person class in high school, and a long-term version of Zoom fatigue has started to kick in. I found myself getting more and more easily distracted by the objects in my peripheral vision—my phone that constantly buzzes with incoming messages, the bright red New York Presbyterian stress ball, a large box of unopened Pocky, to name a few—so when I decided to teach a course on Introduction to Music Theory with Hilary for Spark, I realized that one of the most important aspects of designing the class will be to find ways to engage the students. Most of my considerations are minor, but nonetheless I hope they have somewhat made the course more interesting.

Since Spark classes run on MIT time, where it starts five minutes after the hour, the first five minutes in the Zoom room can feel awkward, especially if the students do not already know each other before class. To alleviate some of the awkwardness, I decided to play a five minute clip of Sergei Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet while students are entering the Zoom room to set the stage for a discourse in classical music. 

An understanding of music theory comes with experience, so I sporadically inserted short questions at the end of selected slides and asked students to answer them in the chat. For instance, I would ask students to name the interval of two notes by separating the steps into identifying the note names, finding the interval number, and determining the interval quality so that the question becomes partitioned into manageable chunks. I was also hoping that this would create some sense of community in the students as they see the answers piling in for each question, which may help bolster the students’ enthusiasm to see that others are engaged. 

There were other challenges, however, that were more difficult to overcome. For example, the students in the course had a wide range of music background: some have been playing piano for more than eight years, while others barely have experience with reading sheet music, which made designing the content of the course quite an obstacle. Our solution to this was to create a fast-paced course consisting of multiple mutually unrelated sub-topics with a wide range in difficulty, ranging from reading in the treble and bass clef to progressions and cadences, so that students without a lot of experience can follow at least some of the mini-topics and the more advanced students won’t feel bored. This design, however, seemed not to have benefited either group of students, as for the former, much of the class went over their heads, and for the latter, the mini-topics still felt like a review. Perhaps a better approach would have been to provide a list of topics in the course description during registration so students have a better sense of what to expect.

I believe that I have benefited from this experience as well, since I now understand the sense of excitement when one more student turns their camera on and when the Zoom chat becomes flooded with responses as students answer the questions, because human interactions are exciting. Hopefully for the next time around, human interactions will be in person, which will be even more exciting.

By Yasmin Sharbaf

Editor’s note: For Spark 2021, teachers had the option of teaching a class that met once (a standalone class) or a class that met thrice (a sequence class).

During all the time I taught for ESP, I always chose to teach sequence classes (except for Splash where I taught one class as a substitute teacher). I believed that I would have time to get to know the students better while also having enough time to develop the curriculum and teach as much as I can during the three or six weeks I have.

However, this time was different; I taught a standalone class instead. To be completely honest, it was all by an accident. When I signed up to teach my class “Introduction to the Stock Market and Cryptocurrency,” I meant to teach it as a sequence class but got mixed up and unintentionally signed to teach sequence, which means I would be teaching the same class for multiple sessions I choose for different students. 

At first, I was opposed to the idea and thought that my class would not be as good as I wanted or that students would not learn in one session. But after teaching my class, I found many advantages of teaching a topic stand-alone than sequence.

1. You have more time to focus on one presentation. I put all my energy and effort into developing one presentation and making sure it was as good as it can be. I also made sure there was no jargon and students could get basic information about the topic from one lecture.
2. You can revamp your course as you go. On top of that, I was able to improve my presentation and slides as I go. This is mainly because as I taught a session, I felt that my next class was always better. After all, I knew what my weaknesses were and how the class could be improved based on students’ feedback and reactions.
3. Students gain more curiosity about a topic. This is a big bonus! I would also debate that students focus more. When you are teaching a topic for one time only, students will be more attentive since this is the only chance they have to ask questions and learn about the topic you are teaching. I think one session develops students’ curiosity and pushes them to learn about the topic later on their own.

By Sagnik Anupam

Originally posted on his blog.

The weekend before last, on Saturday, November 14, 2020, I taught the first class of my life.

Given that I have always wanted to teach something I am passionate about to a class, I suppose my first class had to happen one day or the other. In high school, I never really got either the time or opportunity to “teach” students, so to speak. Sure, I tried to help out people as and when I could in classes, and other times, I talked very animatedly¹ about things I am passionate about, but I had never really taught to a class of students before. And this year, when I got into MIT, I decided to try to change that.

In August, I read CJ Q. ‘23’s blog post about Summer HSSP, which is a summer program run by the MIT Educational Studies Program (MIT ESP). MIT ESP hosts programs where members of the MIT community can teach middle and high school students through programs like Splash, Spark, Cascade, Summer HSSP, and Spring HSSP. Reading the blog helped me understand a bit more about how the ESP programs worked and made me think about whether I could be involved with this. As things were going to be virtual due to COVID-19, I thought I will be able to handle teaching something—because for me, at least, speaking in a Zoom call is a lot less intimidating than presenting to a crowd. And so I made my decision in August—I would teach in the next ESP program that I could register for, which happened to be Splash.

When Splash began to be publicized via dormspam², I was pretty quick to sign up. However, that led to the more problematic question—what should I teach? My mind during the days leading up to the class registration deadline was constantly shuffling between ideas, trying to think of topics that I could do justice to, given my experiences. In all honesty, I didn’t have any previous teaching experience that I could develop into a full-fledged class, so I was pretty nervous about how things would turn out to be.

Ultimately, I decided to try teaching language invention (or conlanging — derived from conlang, or “constructed language”). I had studied some linguistics during my preparation for IOL³, and I had often dabbled in constructing my own languages during school, and although I didn’t feel qualified to talk about this, I thought it was the topic I could speak best about. If nothing else, I reasoned with myself, I will be able to show at least some people something new and encourage them to find the resources that had been developed by more qualified people. In that way, in the utilitarian calculus way of thinking, I would at least end up doing more good than harm, even if I accidentally said something misleading or incorrect during my class.

Splash policy requires each class to have co-teachers, so once I had decided broadly what I would be talking about, I messaged two of my friends whom I first met at the Indian IOL camp, Rujul G. ‘22, and Shinjini G. ‘22. Together, we decided to teach a class titled “Invent a Language!” at Splash this year.

For my section of the slides, I decided to add my own stuff for the history of conlanging and purpose of conlanging, as well as sprinkle in some (read: numerous) examples because I love talking about random trivia associated with language invention. While making my slides, I tried to balance out my more esoteric conlanging references with others that would have been more visibly seen in pop culture. The end result? I ended up talking about everything including the history of the Elvish languages in the Lord of the Rings, Ubese, Blissymbolics, and Transcendental Algebra.

Finally, the day of the class dawned, or should I say the night? As the class was scheduled within the constraints of Eastern Time, I ended up teaching it at 1:30 AM (Sunday morning) in my timezone. One of my worries was that people may not interact much in our class and we may not see as much participation, which might have led to a bit of awkwardness in the Zoom call as some of my slides called for extensive audience participation. However, a lot of people registered for our class (we were almost at full capacity!) and many of them were happy to talk about why they thought certain linguistic phenomena were occurring and how we could explain any contradictions or anomalies. Overall, I thought it was a great teaching experience, and I hope to continue teaching this class (and others, hopefully!) in future ESP programs.

Bonus Content:

If you made it to the end of this blog post, I would like to share some resources to get started with conlanging. These are also helpful if you are interested in fantasy worldbuilding or general linguistics.

• David J Peterson’s book The Art of Language Invention:From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building.
• The Language Construction Kit, available here.
• Omniglot! It has tonnes of useful information about languages ranging from scripts to language profiles.
• TAKASUGI Shinji’s Number Systems of the World.
• The Max Planck Institute’s Former Department of Linguistics’ page on Numeral Systems of the World’s Languages.
• UManitoba’s resource on Systematic Kinship Terminologies.

Happy conlanging!

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1. read: with lots of hand waving
2. This refers to the numerous mailing lists that we have. At MIT, we can create our own mailing lists using our MIT emails and add others to them, and over time this has led to the creation of a few dorm-wide mailing lists that have a large membership. So the most effective way to raise awareness among the MIT student body (at least for the undergrads) is to publicize events or posting reminders by emailing them to all the dorm-wide mailing lists, or “dormspam.”
3. The International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) is an international linguistics competition for school students. More details here.