Read about Michigan Tech students who have partnered with Keweenaw Bay Indian Community’s Natural Resources Department on a variety of research projects:
Huskies Serve as Virtual K-12 Tutors During the Pandemic
When the Covid-19 pandemic began this spring, it rapidly affected every facet of life including the lives of K-12 students and families across the country when schools began closing. Schools changed gears to provide virtual and remote education almost overnight, a major challenge for teachers, students and parents alike. At the same time as universities closed, Michigan Tech students also found themselves stuck at home with plenty of their own on-line class work, but still wondering how they could help the community. As Tech students, faculty, and alumni brainstormed and connected with local educators for advice, Tech Tutors – a free, virtual tutoring program for K-12 students – was born.
Connecting on Zoom, Elise Cheney-Makens (alum and Community Engagement Coordinator for the Pavlis Honors College), Lydia Savatsky (undergraduate), and Charles Fugate (alum) worked together to quickly roll out the Tech Tutors program in a matter of weeks. By early May, the program was up and running.
Tech Tutors allows Michigan Tech students to volunteer while staying home to keep their families, friends, and communities safe. Volunteer tutors and K-12 students meet virtually through programs like Zoom. Participants range in age from first grade up through high school, and tutors help their students with everything from solving basic math problems to learning the principles of acids and bases by dipping oranges in baking soda or diving into the complex scientific and social implications of the pandemic. Currently, participating students come from throughout the Western U.P., and tutors are able to work with any students and families interested in tutoring.
The benefits of Tech Tutors extends far beyond helping with subjects like English, science, and math. While completing schoolwork and traditional learning are essential parts of the program, equally important is tutors mentoring and building connections with their students. At a time when many people – K-12 students, families, and college students alike – have had their normal routines and lives interrupted, building connections with new people, supporting one another, and learning from new perspectives is more valuable than ever before.
Created by students, faculty, staff, and alumni in the Pavlis Honors College, the Tech Tutors program will begin operating this fall under the Center for Educational Outreach at Michigan Tech and the program will continue to help K-12 students – and provide opportunities for Michigan Tech students to give back – as we navigate what school and life look like during the ever-changing Covid-19 world.
More information about Tech Tutors and how to get involved is available on their website.
One of the most important things students can do is become civically engaged. Watch this video to learn how to vote absentee if you’re a Michigan citizen. If you live out-of-state, go to vote.gov to find out how to vote this November.
Interested in being a math tutor with Americorps? Apply now for the upcoming school year: https://www.sagaeducation.org
With the intense end to our projects, the team decided to spend the last few days exploring the country and meeting up with old and new friends. Our first stop was the Volta region with our language instructor Edzordzi and his friend Augustina. They happened to be in Ghana at the same time we were despite studying back in the United States, so we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend some time with them. Edzordzi is from the Volta region and offered to take us there to show us some of the major places.
Our first stop was the Akosombo hydroelectric dam, a major source of electricity for Ghana. We stopped in Akosombo for lunch and then took a boat ride to see the dam and the natural beauty of the region from the water. From there, we took a trotro out to the city of Ho and spent a night relaxing on the side of a mountain at a hotel. The next morning, we made the journey out to the Wli waterfall, West Africa’s tallest waterfall. While the weather wasn’t great, we all still had a great time splashing in the water and goofing around. Once we were done, we started the long journey back to Accra for the night.
The next morning, the team headed out to Cape Coast to relax on the beach and explore the History of Ghana at the Cape Coast Slave Castle. We spent our first day there relishing in the sunshine and playing in the Atlantic. The waves were quite large so we couldn’t swim, but that didn’t stop any of us from having a good time. The next day, the team got up early to take a taxi out to Kakum National Park. While we knew what a canopy walk was, the reality of being over 40m up in the air over the forest was daunting. The team pushed on and had a great time up in the air. Edzordzi then met us back at our hotel and came with us to tour the Slave Castle. It was a very eye-opening experience to walk in a place that once housed over 1000 slaves and see what conditions they truly existed under.
After Cape Coast, the team returned to Accra to see a bit more of the city
and get some final work done. When we weren’t consolidating our resources for future teams, we met with Augustina at the University of Ghana – Accra to see the campus and explore the Botanical Gardens there. It was the perfect way to say goodbye to our new friend and see another piece of the natural beauty Ghana contains. From there, the team headed back to the hotel to work some more on logistics and start packing.
This post was written from the Kotoka Airport in Ghana. From there, the team is splitting up with Tristan heading back home to the States and Becky and Lucinda spending a week in Europe. It is safe to say that five weeks in Ghana is something no one on the team will forget, and we have all learned something from the experience. At times Ghana frustrated us, surprised us, and confused us, often all at the same time, but in the end, we survived the journey and made a difference.
Thank you to everyone who has followed our blog over the weeks and supported us on our journey, we couldn’t have done it without you!
-Lucinda, Becky, and Tristan
Hujambo from Tanzania! This week, the Tanzania Tree Huggers finished up our work Orkolili secondary school. During our final days in Tanzania, we continued to teach English at Orkolili and observe more classes. Friday was an exam day for them so we were told not to come in. We took up having a long weekend as the chance to head back to Moshi and visit the project sites we had been working at previously. We spent Friday and much of Saturday at both Margaret’s and Msamaria brainstorming project ideas for next year’s team to work on.
On Sunday, we went on an excursion with some of the other people staying at Eva’s to the base of Kilimanjaro, a local Chagga museum, a coffee plantation, Chagga caves, and a big waterfall. It was a great last big trip to do in Tanzania that allowed us to learn more about the local tribes.
Monday was still exams at Orkolili so we took the morning slow before eventually going into school. Once there, we were finally able to meet with Tom, Mama M’cha’s son who helps manage the school. He helped explain to us how their water system works and the plans for the rainwater storage system that they are currently building. Emily was able to provide some input into the water system since that is her specialty and Tom set us up a trip to the local water filtration plant to tour the facilities and ask some questions that might help Orkolili establish the safety of the water that they use. After our talk with Tom, we met another volunteer visiting from England who was starting out her four week stay here teaching sports. She had set up a ping pong table so we watched a few rounds before heading home for the day.
We headed to Orkolili bright and early on Tuesday to finish up working on PowerPoint we were creating on engaging teaching techniques before heading off to learn more about Boma’s water system. It was a great experience to get to learn about where their water comes from and how it is treated.
For our final day, we headed to Snowview Hotel to work on finishing up some homework and to relax! Our flight did not leave until 9 PM so we enjoyed the last moments of our trip before heading off to go home. It was such a great experience and we were really sad to leave Tanzania and all of the amazing people we met along the way!
After relaxing at Mole, the team hit the ground running to begin the final push for projects in Ghana. After quite a few meetings early on in our week, the team met with Headmistress Janet at the UENR Basic School to discuss our potential involvement in the classrooms. Since the students were taking exams that week, we worked with the school to get 30 minutes of their time on Wednesday and Thursday. The teachers seemed to think this would be a good way to break up the exams for the students and engage them with a fun activity. The team returned to our hostel and brainstormed what activities we could do with the students. The students themselves were quite young- kindergarten through third grade- so we wanted them to learn creative problem solving without getting into the science behind it.
We ultimately decided tinfoil boat would engage the students and could be done without much complex science being taught. This led to an intense tinfoil cutting session in our kitchen to prepare enough squares for roughly 8 full classrooms. The next day, the team headed to the schools with tinfoil, buckets, and weights in hand for the activities. Each member of the team was assigned a classroom to do the activity with, and we got to work. As soon as we finished with our first classrooms, we were each assigned a second classroom to work with. We ended our day after two classrooms each and headed back to the hostel to prepare for two more classrooms the following day. The two classrooms were both kindergarten age so we had to really think about how we wanted to present the activity to them. In the end, we stayed together as a team and worked with the students. The teachers at the school were a huge help both days in helping to explain the activity and distribute materials faster. Both days were a success to us- the children had a good time and learned about problem solving with a hands-on activity.
With a day of rest and planning in between, the team headed back to Babianiha on Saturday to meet with Watuza (the headmaster of the schools there), Ebenezer (part of the family we were staying with and an important member of the community), and Kwame Amoah (an elder for the village) in order to identify the needs of the community for future projects. They insisted that their main focus was on education for the students because they would be the future of the village and Ghana. With that in mind, we talked with them on what could be done to help improve the education and experience of the students there. One place they especially wanted help was the community center. We had already brought them books earlier on the trip, but there were some serious flaws with the center. As we were talking, we realized that while we couldn’t assist with all of the issues they had mentioned in the short time we had left, we could help with one or two. The team worked with them to figure out estimates for two of the key issues, seating and work tables and getting electricity to the building, and the elders pledged to contribute towards the projects with us. Once we finished discussing, the team headed back to Sunyani for the night to not only figure out a plan for the community center needs but to also prepare for a women’s health workshop on Monday.
From left to right: Evans Opuni, Lucinda Hall, Kwame Amoah, Becky Daniels, Ebenzer Opuni, and Watuza
The women’s health workshop was set-up with the assistance of Nana who knew Headmistress Theresa of St. James through church. While completing some errands with Nana, we met with the headmistress to talk about how many young women to expect and what we were planning on discussing with them. It was revealed that the workshop could be to as many as 300 young women and any information we could give the girls would be appreciated. Once we returned to the hostel that night, it became apparent that we didn’t have nearly enough supplies for that many young women and would not have enough time to lead a workshop with them on assembling the reusable sanitary napkins. As a team, we decided we would assemble as many napkins as we could by ourselves and distribute them to the women who really needed them after a quick discussion with them about women’s health. In order to complete this task, the team dedicated most of the night following Babianiha and Sunday towards creating them. We had acquired a manual sewing machine but it proved nearly impossible to work with our limited knowledge on them. We only completed a few of them by Monday morning- not nearly enough for the girls- but made a plan to make it work. We would go in and give the workshop and distribute the ones we had done. We would then spend the next few days hand sewing the rest of the napkins for the women and drop them off before we left Sunyani.
Luckily for us, one of the teachers assisting us with the discussion taught sewing felt confident that she could help the girls assemble them if we brought in what we couldn’t sew as kits. We completed the discussion with the young women and helped to answer any questions they had but might have been too uncomfortable to ask in the past. Overall, the workshop was a success to us, and the Headmistress Theresa expressed interest in seeing some of our STEM activities next year too. The next couple of days the team sewed several more napkins and assembled kits with the rest of the materials. It was frustratingly slow at times, but we powered through and had many kits and pads for the young women by the time the team left Wednesday morning.
In between sewing, the team made another trip out to Babianiha on Tuesday. We had worked out that we could help provide the community center with 30 desks and benches so that students could have classes in the building and easy access to the materials there. In return, the elders would contribute the funds necessary to get electricity to the building so that laptops and other resources could be used within the building. As we got to Babianiha, the elders had all gathered at a local funeral and we were given the opportunity to join them for a but before we went and had a meeting with them. A Ghanaian funeral more resembles a party with great music than an American funeral, so it was really interesting to be there.. After a few minutes, the elders invited us to a separate place to have a discussion on the next steps. The carpenter was called and we provided the funding for the desks and benches to be ordered. In return, the elders promised they would ensure that the desks and benches would be completed and kept in good condition so that students for many years could benefit from the community center. The team returned back to Sunyani for the last night there with the blessings of the community.
Being our last few days in Sunyani, the team worked hard to wrap up all other projects and say goodbye to our contacts. On Monday night, Nana and Emmanuel Opuni hosted us for dinner as a send off to our next adventures. During the day, we met with Jay from UENR several times to tie up our project with him. Jay is the president of their equivalent of student council and is extremely interested in working with us to make STEM education in Ghana more interactive and sustainable. With him, we set up the structure for an organization that would work with local schools to create interactive STEM activities once a month for the students. The team and Jay wrote an outline for a constitution for the group and identified the needs of the organization starting out. We also agreed to share our resources and contacts with him to help get the organization into the local schools we had already worked with. We were sad to say goodbye to Jay, but we look forward to continuing to work with Jay and the organization once we return back to the United States. A major goal for the team this year was to find a way to make our projects sustainable and the organization presents a unique opportunity for us to have a lasting impact long after we have gone.
With our project work wrapped up, we had our sights set on a part of Ghana previously unexplored by Pavlis students: the Volta region!
Stay tuned to see what we got up to there!
–Lucinda, Tristan, and Becky
During our third week in Peru, we got the chance to teach an English class to the rambunctious kids in the Huntapausqa organization. Before going in we did a little bit of prep work and made flashcards of for all the children. Going into it we weren’t sure what level of English skills the kids had so we ranged from the most basic skills(counting numbers) to a little bit harder skills(formal questions). Most of the children new numbers up to ten and some basic greetings like HELLO and BYE, but besides that, they weren’t too confident. We started off our lessons by writing the translations from Spanish to English on the board and then going through each phrase. Next, we went through the room and had each individual kid pronounce each word. Some children were more eager to learn English than others and were even taking notes. Something we could work on in the future is adding more actions or games. We didn’t really account for the fact that some kids couldn’t read yet. It was a great experience and has a lot of potential for the future.
We also helped Huntapasqa prepare their water tank for a Pollada (They sold cooked chicken for donations). Since they live on a hill, if you want some kind of running water, you put a water tank at the top of the hill and run a hose down. Then some workers come around and you pay them to fill up your tank with clean water. They had the water tank in place, but it hadn’t been covered, so it was coated in dirt on the inside and filled with rainwater. Nic ended up hopping inside the tank to make sure it was sparkling clean!
At the end of the week, we took a little trip to explore the north of Peru to a place called Huaraz! It was beautiful. The altitude was about 10,000 feet and we went on a hike up to 18,000 feet. We were definitely not prepared, but it was worth it.
Hujambo from Tanzania! This week, the Tanzania Tree Huggers continued our work at Orkolili secondary school! On Thursday, we were planning on attending day two at the Nelson Mandela Institute but unfortunately, the school decided not to return so instead, we spent the day observing classes such as form I English and English literature (approximately eighth grade), form IV mathematics, and form IV biology. These observations at least gave us a basic understanding of how classes at Orkolili function and what kinds of methods are being used there.
Friday was a shorter day for us since Friday afternoons are dedicated to religious studies in Swahili which they sent us home before but it was also our first day teaching there. We were popped into form I English again for the 80 minute block where we had the students create and present dialogues focusing on going to the market, read a part of the book that they had been reading the previous day (Hawa the Bus Driver), and played two rounds of “Simon Says” to practice both English and commands, something they had also been discussing the previous day.
On Saturday, we went back to Arusha one final time to explore a bit more and meet up with Brenda, a contact who had previously gotten her PhD at Michigan Tech before moving to Tanzania to work. We met up with her at a coffee shop and discussed both her experiences and ours. Afterwards, we did a bit more shopping for souvenirs before heading back to Boma where we spent the rest of the weekend relaxing.
For the remainder of the week, we pretty much repeated the same routine of going to school, teaching a class English, and then observing some classes. It was great getting to chat with the students after class about both our lives in the U.S. and their lives here in Tanzania. Learning what we can from the students is one of our favorite parts of being in the schools.
Week four turned out pretty good! On to the final week in Tanzania!
As many of you probably don’t know, the Peru football team (*cough cough* soccer) hasn’t been to the American Cup Finals in 44 years, but they made it this year, and Lima was insane. We have never seen so many people watching a soccer game in our lives. Even during the semifinals, we were walking down the streets and there was nobody out that wasn’t watching the game. People were crowded around every TV there was. If you had a TV, it was turned on to the game. Every store had people circled around it, watching intently. We went to a cafe 15 minutes before the game was over, and we watched the shootout between Peru and Chile! It was super intense. When Peru made it to the final, Miraflores (a district in Lima, and where Nic and I live) closed a street and set up a screen so everyone could watch the game together. Peru didn’t win, but they did score a point against Brazil, and I’m pretty sure the whole city shook.
This week, Nic and I held two design thinking workshops. One for the “Promotores” (Nataly, Rocio, and Eveli), so they could take part in it, and one for the mothers in their community in Pamplona Alta (30 women showed up!). It started off shaky because even though I can speak a decent amount of Spanish, It was very hard for me to answer questions off of the “script”. I could give them a very vague answer, but sometimes I didn’t even know what their question was. No one there knew English, so I couldn’t even use my Spanglish skills. After a while, we got into a better swing of things, but they struggled to come up with solutions, and with my limited Spanish vocabulary, I struggled to help them. In the future, when we have Design Thinking workshops, I think I’ll get a translator because I could give an okay description on how to accomplish the task, but I think they missed the huge point of the workshop. I couldn’t get them to realize they can start a program to fix some of these issues they have. For example, one of the problems they have is that a lot of people just throw their dirty water in the street because they don’t have plumbing, and since they live in the hills where nothing grows, it makes everything really gross and mucky and hard for “cars” to go up. One of their solutions was to tell people “don’t throw your water in the street”, but when they do that they aren’t really fixing a problem. Some other problems they talked about was the trash being thrown in the street, the stray dogs, fathers not being there for their kids, not having plumbing or electricity, not being able to get a house in your name, and not having many plants. In the end, we don’t think they understood that they could be the ones to be the change, and that was the whole part of the workshop. We have another design thinking workshop in the future, so we plan on updating the process and using Carlos as a translator.
