In a thru-hike, after either my feet stop hurting or I become numb to their pain, I find myself studying trail maps. The first two weeks of maps, I studied before I began hiking. After that, I always needed to figure out the next few hundred miles of re-supply rations and where challenge points would show up. Challenges to look for usually included a distance larger than 90 miles between resupplies, water gaps of 20 miles or longer, towns with no good resupply options, drastically changing terrain in terms of elevation, large river crossings, national parks or forests with special permit needs, etc.
By taking time to study not only the maps for the next day, but the larger overview gave me a better perspective on what would come soon and how I should prepare myself. If I knew the terrain would have drastic changes in elevation, I would lower my expected daily mileage and therefore take more food out from town. If I knew I would have two long stretches without water, I would grab an extra Gatorade bottle or two from the last town so I could carry more water. If I knew a town would only have a gas station to resupply out of, I would usually have a mail drop of food to get more healthy calories.
In grad school, in order to prepare and understand the overview of the program, I had to listen to vast quantities of information and process it quickly. At the beginning of our fall teaching practicum, our teaching team began to look overwhelmed from a mass intake of information and as one of our faculty, Matt said snickering, “It’s just like drinking from a fire hose!” As if that was meant to make us feel better.
In order to teach effectively, we had to know the TSS systems inside and out to know where we would have difficulties and to know what we could and could not do with students. At this point, I’d become numb to my brain hurting, and just began trying to continue absorbing more and more information. No open toed shoes. No swimming. Stay 100 feet away from wildlife. Then came the famous, “What would you do…WHAT would you do?” scenarios. We had to constantly hear scenarios from past teaching situations and try to think about what we would have done in that situation, then find where it says what to do in the operations manual. For example:
What would you do if you are in upper meadow and a thunderstorm rolls in? You see lightning and heard thunder soon afterwards. You have eight students and a chaperone. Two students begin crying. Where do you go and what do you do with the upset students?
TSS also took getting an overview to a whole new level. Not only did we have to drink from the fire hose to learn how to teach effectively, we also had to juggle classwork on top of teaching. We had to learn the local ecology, geology, fire regiments, glacial impacts, cultural history, and more. To effectively teach students, we had to know the content inside and out.
The Tetons from the West, on our grad backcountry trip
Read Full Post »