The New Role of Teachers in The Information Age
Author: Ekaterina Kostioukhina I am Dr. Ekaterina Kostioukhina, and I teach Space Medicine! Every time I design a lecture, I ask myself these questions: How can I make a one-hour lecture more meaningful for these students who are the future of our next generations? I know I can teach them a lot of information, science, and…
What to do when life gets hectic and your Splash class student enrollment gets doubled in size at the last minute
Author: Grace Jiang Kate and I sit side by side at the head of a brightly lit, empty classroom, surrounded at all edges by black chalkboards, facing rows of long wooden tables and bright blue plastic chairs. It reminds me of my recitation classrooms. At the tiny, back corner of my mind, thoughts of uncompleted…
Blog for the Ripple: Splash 2021 Teacher Edition!
It came after the Splash, but it’s gonna keep going: The Ripple! ESP is continuing our official blog, so that you can share your amazing experiences taking and teaching classes. ESP (and your students) would love to have blog posts from teachers. Perhaps you can talk about signing up to teach 19 hours of classes,…
The best free virtual teaching resources for educators, whether you’re in-person or online
Author: Anna Moss I’m Anna Moss, the founder of Mind the Test. I received my BA in Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and after that, I taught English online for five years while also traveling the world and tutoring test prep. I actually spent two years in Bangkok tutoring kids who wanted to come…
Blog for the Ripple: Summer HSSP 2021 Teacher Edition!
It came after the Splash, but it’s gonna keep going: The Ripple! ESP is continuing our official blog, so that you can share your amazing experiences taking and teaching classes. ESP (and your students) would love to have blog posts from teachers. Perhaps you can talk about signing up to teach 19 hours of classes,…
Virtual Plants
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…
My 50 Cents on Online Teaching
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…
Teaching in Sequence vs. Teaching Standalone Classes
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…
Invent a Language! – Teaching at Splash 2020
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…
Engaging Virtually: slides, water, and variety
by Athena Capo-Battaglia Creating an engaging class can be difficult, but fortunately many things can help! When making the slides for my course, I tried to keep the slides simple, and included helpful pictures/diagrams/bullet points to accompany what I was saying rather than writing everything on the slide. I, then, put the information in my…
Blog for the Ripple: Splash 2020 Teacher Edition!
It came after the Splash, but it’s gonna keep going: The Ripple! ESP is continuing our official blog, so that you can share your amazing experiences taking and teaching classes. ESP (and your students) would love to have blog posts from teachers. Perhaps you can talk about signing up to teach 19 hours of classes,…
spoon homicide: the birth of a meme, and how it (vaguely) relates to teaching history
by Alan Zhu This story starts with a graph. My co-teacher and I are doing research for our inconveniently named class, “Did We Start the Fire? History from 1949-1989 as Told by Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire.’” There’s a very useful website called Genius which has, through the power of crowdsourcing, compiled the…
On my first ever 125 participant class
by Stuti Khandwala Consider this as a story of how education changed after the lockdown in the eyes of a teacher (who is also a student), as well as an appreciation for one of the biggest student-run clubs at MIT known as the Educational Studies Program (ESP). ESP runs programs throughout the year for middle-school…
Sometimes Sharks Travel in Packs: on Group Teaching
by Audrey DeVault Building a 6-week course from the ground up is a significant undertaking. It’s not something that fits in easily with an already busy schedule, and as such, when my co-teachers and I first considered teaching a course through HSSP, we were hesitant. We are all rising sophomores at Caltech, and many of…
A Blog on Teaching
by Bil Lewis Dear Blog… My “philosophy” of teaching is based on the idea that I can drive the students crazier than they can drive me. Ha hahaha… But in a serious way, I want the students to be interested, excited in what we’re studying, and laughing. I dress and teach as James Madison (4th…
Scattered Thoughts
by Mandar Juvekar Since the start of HSSP many scattered thoughts vaguely related to the program have called my brain home. Some serious, some not as much, these thoughts have helped keep me entertained through an otherwise monotonous summer. Here is a quick highlight reel, with the hope that perhaps one or two of them…
How we’re teaching high schoolers to code, online
by Cameron Kleiman When Christian and I decided we wanted to teach high schoolers about the novel programming language Julia, I knew we would need a certain amount of infrastructure in order to support our students. One particular interest of mine was making sure our solutions scaled. We opened the class to 50 students, with…
Dipping My Toes into Online Learning
by Arianna Krinos In step with the random extra Shark Week TV specials we’ve been blessed with as an unintended positive side effect of the quarantine, this year’s shark-flavored HSSP was an atypical venture into extracurricular education for high school students. With serendipity, my area of study also happens to be Biological Oceanography, and my…
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The Ripple 