The cliche is that schoolteachers have their entire summers free from work.
The reality is quite different. On Wednesday morning, plenty of teachers – and a number of students – were inside Cortland Junior-Senior High School disproving that theory.
Inside Theresa Johnson’s science classroom, she and colleague Anna Higgins mapped out a 40-week plan on a sheet of gridded paper, including where in a year’s worth of 38-minute classes they would cover each of the 22 key concepts they planned to teach their students. The planning was part of a three-day camp in which the teachers planned out what their year would look like.
Some of the material students would cover seems basic – but knowing and understanding “how do you organize’ and “how do you study?,” Johnson said, could make a significant difference in the school lives of the seventh-graders who the pair will teach this year when their students begin working with an aquaponics system.
Those students might not have had a significant use for study skills in elementary school, but that’s likely to change.
Aquaponics is a system of aquaculture – essentially, farming in water rather than in soil – in which waste produced by farmed fish or (other aquatic animals) supplies nutrients for plants grown hydroponically. That, in turn, purifies the water in which the plants are grown.
Johnson has a number of guppies in a tank in her classroom. Higgins’ room, just across the hall, has a similar number of guppies – each group could contribute to students’ learning about aquaponics.
Johnson, who is entering her 16th year of teaching after being employed in Phoenix, Arizona, and Los Angeles, before moving to Cortland with her husband. She says she feels rewarded when she shares knowledge with Higgins, who is entering Year Three of her teaching career.
Later in the week, the two plan to consider minor improvements to a system of study guides they developed to help students organize their note-taking and prepare for tests.
“Last year was the first year we did this,” Johnson said. It helps students learn the concepts being taught, while maintaining the notebooks “helps teach the kids goal-setting.”
Activity was going on across the campus.
Some high school seniors are using rollers and brushes to apply paint to personalize the parking spaces they will use at the school. Grass was mowed. Work was happening at the football field.
Down the hall from Johnson’s class, a handful of students were finishing their third day of the week-long Makerspace Camp. A day earlier, said instructor Jonathan Herr, they had designed and constructed artificial limbs, then tried them to see how well they did – or did not – function.
In the music wing, students at Modern Band Camp rehearsed songs to be performed Sunday at Cortland Porchfest. Earlier, they had an academic summer camp known as Tiger Academy.
The summer camps, funded by American Rescue Plan Act funds, are free for students to attend.
