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Outreach Project Gone Wrong (S&D)

by Elizabeth Navarro
(Stanford, CA)

I woke up this morning from a dream that my group's teaching presentation at Menlo Atherton went terribly wrong. Pretty much the worst case scenario. To begin, we had missed out transportation early in the day and had to fly to the school on Razor scooters. I didn't seem to recognize the absurdity of scooters in the sky during my dream but we finally arrived at the school on time and President Hennessy escorted us to our classroom. When we arrived at the room, we peered in to see 30 5 year-olds sitting in their desks waiting for our presentation. I was really relieved to see 5 year-olds because they were far less intimidating than the high school students I was expecting. Then they opened their mouths to speak and they sounded like a bunch of 30-year old academics. We started our presentation and I pulled out my poster, only to see that it was on Reality Television, rather than Sleep and Dreams.


I started to teach these intelligent 5 year-olds about reality T.V., we watched an episode of Jersey Shore, and then we analyzed the social roles played by each character. After that, Ronnie and JWow from The Jersey Shore made a guest appearance during our presentation. When they walked in, all of the 5 year-olds seemed to already know them. They started talking in Jersey accents and their skin turned orange. All of a sudden, they started a party in the classroom and my group and I immediately ran out (terrified, I guess). We couldn't take the scooters back since they were stuck up in a tree so we hopped on the CalTrain which took us right to our door in Suites.

Comments for Outreach Project Gone Wrong (S&D)

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Aug 22, 2011
 Failure or success?
by: Hawkmoon

Actually i wouldn't call that presentation a complete failure. :) You seem to work in some job where delivery of essential facts to certain people is most important thing and makes difference between sucess and failure. Your dream actually made certain interesting points about your job: "kids" seem to be more younger and posses more knowledge by use of internet and media, and seem to know everybody. You have to deal with that, and dream was about making a sucessfull delivery, although you felt terrified at the end. But it was success, hence the party and appearance of the Jersey crew. At the end, you seem to be more comfortable with your own methods (of transportation) then with this new and exciting stuff that doesn't work always (and that will eventually end up stuck in trees) :D Good dream nevertheless!

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