For any students interested in becoming teachers, Ida B. Wells has its own teaching internship! To sign up for it, you can forecast for the Intro to Education class to learn more about the education field of work.

One of the assignments for the class was to make a class lesson plan which required them to read books to children that explain more difficult topics in a way that is simple and straightforward for the kids. The majority of these books are written by Kids Co., which is a company that makes kid’s books about complicated topics that are really easy to understand and were written by people who have experience in the topic. The books that were read to the kids ranged from talking about empathy, disabilities, gender and many other topics.

This was the first time the class has done individual lesson plans for the students. “I think it’s really good for me to do it and to get familiar with the students and to have a bit of a teaching experience instead of just observing and watching what goes on in the classroom,” said Evan Neimeyer, a sophomore at Ida B. Wells. Neimeyer is interning at an 8th-grade English class at Robert Gray Middle School and is doing a lesson plan about book banning.

It’s very important for children to learn about these difficult topics at a young age so they can grow up being normalized to the idea of these subjects. Dana Sendelbach, a sophomore at IBW, is reading a book about empathy and kindness from the perspective of bugs to Rieke students. She thinks that it is a good way to get them thinking about kindness and empathy, as this is something they’ll need to know their whole lives, using something that they are familiar and comfortable with. “At a young age, I think that information dumping on elementary schoolers is not going to be helpful for anyone,” said Sendelbach. “ But the younger you can start ideas, the better and further they’ll develop.”

This class is a good opportunity for students who are interested in being teachers or want to learn more about being a teacher. The internship gives students hands-on experience to be able to experience what it’s like to be a teacher. “It’s really great to get time in the classroom to actually experience what it’s like to be a teacher, even if it’s just for a short amount of time each week,” said Ada Strecker, a junior at Ida B. Wells. Strecker’s lesson plan is about disabilities at schools, and the book she is reading was written by an author with cerebral palsy who wants to be able to inform children about what it’s like going to school with a challenging disease.

“It’s just a good class,” said Ava Michael, a junior at Ida B. Wells.  “You have a lot of responsibility and it doesn’t feel like a normal classroom and you get to control a lot of what you want to learn about and what you want to do.”

So if you are thinking about being a teacher, Intro to Education is a highly recommended class for students to get hands-on experience with teaching.