Everyone was a little
nervous last night at dinner when we started talking about our expectations for
our summer camp that began this morning.
As expected, we thought that the morning registration and scavenger hunt
of the American Air Museum at Duxford would be chaotic and we were right. It is very similar to the first day of
school, and a blind person could see that the organizers of this summer
residency program haven’t had any teaching experience and were a little
overwhelmed. However, at the end of the
day, the first day was a success.
My group taught the
same lesson 3 different times because of the large number of students, we broke
them into groups of 15 so it wasn’t too different from a normal class, expect
for the fact that we broke the content down so that all 5 members of my group
would teach something different. What we
had was a phenomenal group of teachers who planned and collaborated together –
a wonderful model of team teaching! Our
lesson today focused on Preconceptions that Americans had about England and
vice versa beginning in 1942 upon the arrival of US forces to Duxford. Below are some of the highlights of our
lesson we taught today:
*We asked the UK students to write down things that
they would tell US exchange students
today that
were coming over to the UK. Then we said
that it wasn’t very different from 1942
when the US
troops first arrived, minus the lack of technology that is around today.
*We showed a short 5 minute clip from a US video from
WWII that taught the US troops about
the differences
and similarities between our 2 cultures as they first arrived in the UK in
1942.
(We will be
showing some small clips of WWII propaganda on Thursday night at the movie
theatre on
the base before we show our main feature to the students – The Memphis Belle).
*I talked about the crew positions of a B-17 bomber
and explained the role and responsibility
of each man. Afterwards, we handed out each student a
replica War Department ID card
of an actual person
who flew a B-17 bomber in WWII. They
will keep this all week and on
Friday
morning, they will research that individual and find out what happened to that
person during
WWII.
*Finally, we differentiated the sizes between the US
and UK on a map. Once the students had
that basic
understanding, we informed them that over 3 million US troops arrived in the UK
beginning in
1942 and had them come to the map on the board and place a string from that
persons home
state and they connected it to the location of Duxford on the map. We did this
to reiterate
the size difference, number of troops, and different locations that the US
troops
came from in the US to help them understand how
much of a change/struggle it was when the
US troops
arrived in the UK and had to assimilate to the new culture as they prepared to
defeat
our common
enemy – Hitler and NAZI Germany.
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