Benno Final Reflection

Overall I feel that my workshop was a complete success.  Two things that went very well were that the kids loved it and had a great time learning about hunger, and that the pretzels cooled fast enough so that everybody was always working and not just sitting around.  I really enjoyed being a teacher for two hours, but now feel bad for other teachers, because I felt how hard it was to control younger children.  Even though the children were fussy in the end I managed to settle them down.  In the end it was a great experience being a teacher and I think it taught me a lot about patience.  If I could have changed something in my workshop I think it would have been the power point, I would have taken out the pictures and talked more about our experience.  I think that this would have helped because the students did not really need to see all the pictures, one would have been enough, and sharing more about our experience would help them understand our feelings about the topic.  One of the major things I learned, that will stay with me forever, is that hunger has no disguise.  This will stay with me because it was something that I really noticed when I was on my visits at the Food Bank For New York, it was very disturbing to see that people with one or even two jobs still needed help buying necessities like food.

I feel that I did not do much in my set up group,which was deciding which groups would be in what room and what teacher would be supervising, because my group mates would not let me.  When they did not let me I worked around it and helped in a different set up group, which was deciding what group each kid was going in to.  I liked the process that led up to the teach-in, but one thing that could have been different is that one teacher was assigned to each group and would help them plan all the visits out and maybe even go on the visits with them.  Overall I loved the teach-in and wish I could do it all over next year, it also was incredibly fun and I will never forget it.