The sound of two dozen eighth-graders filled the Visser Hall classroom as each tried to get enough signatures to finish the scavenger hunt.
“Do you like social studies?”
“I lost my paper!”
“Whose is this?”
“Have you ever been outside Kansas?”
The papers began filling up as the students found a place to sign each other’s list. Yes, this one liked to read. Yes, that one was usually on time for things. Some of the qualities seemed random at times, but everyone could find something they agreed with.
Emporia State University professors Paul Bland and Scott Waters smiled. They had them.
“If you put your name on at least one box, you have at least one characteristic that would make you an excellent teacher,” Bland said. “It’s all the things you’ve identified and more.”
Thursday marked the return of the Mini-Teacher Academy to ESU, the university’s attempt to persuade eighth-graders to go to college and, if possible, to become teachers. Anyone can apply, but many of those chosen are students who would be the first in their family to go to college.
Now in its third year, the program is in high demand, ESU will hold similar mini-academies for Wichita and Topeka students this year and would gladly add more schools to the list if time and personnel allowed — which they don’t.
“We’ve had a lot of middle schools say ‘When is it our turn? When can we come?” Waters said. “But we can only do three. That’s about all we can manage.”
The one-day course is something of a precursor to the five-day Future Teacher Academies ESU holds in the summer for high school students. The mini-academies are less involved and more of a chance to taste a lot of things at once -- hearing about campus life from college students, touring the college, brainstorming things that would make a teaching career worthwhile, even reading to little kids at the campus preschool.
“They came up and asked if they could sit on my lap,” said 13-year-old Janessa Curfew after the story time. “I said ‘Sure, why not?’ It doesn’t bother me, as long as they don’t do anything bad.”