Holly Springs Part Six

We were proposing was a four hour summer school broken down into four fifty-minute “periods” with a five minute break in between each lesson. We would have two or three second-years and two or three first-years in each room. One of the second-years would teach one fifty-minute lesson once a day and the rest of the periods would be taught by the first-years (after the first few days, of course.) This solved all of the problems that I previously listed. It was real critical-needs kids in a real school setting with excellent MTC teachers modeling good teaching and providing continuous feedback to the first-years.

I had another meeting with the teachers at the end of April. While they could see all of these potential benefits many were wary of participating. However, we made some concessions that helped ease the wariness. First, we rearranged the schedule so that they could take the computer class as an online course during the summer. This allowed us to keep the second-years from attending Saturday classes in the spring. Two, we arranged with Holly Springs to pay the second-years a small stipend. Three, we said that it was very likely that they would all get laptop computers (which now looks like it, unfortunately, won’t happen.)

Once that fire was put out we turned our attention to the students. To make it work we needed 100 students. The Friday before summer school we were 30 kids short...