Earlier this week, one of my colleagues, Robin, asked me how many weeks I had left at the Ohio History Connection. An easy question to answer, but reality didn’t hit at that moment. The past seven weeks have been filled with student facilitations, marker-dusted fingers, hundreds of open research tabs, and plenty more mini memories that have encompassed my internship. This week wasn’t unlike the previous, with a week’s worth of summer programs to visit all over Columbus….or so I thought.

I’ve been revisiting a specific site since the beginning of my internship, but I finally got to the last visit this past Thursday. In the beginning, visiting the students seemed like the most intimidating thing. Of course I was going to try to teach them something, but I worried about whether or not we’d all be engaged. You see, I never wanted any of the children to think I was talking or teaching to them, but rather with them. This was a key “easier said than done” moment, but I did not want to give up without trying my best. Initially, I would rack my brain (for longer than I should have) on how I could connect better with these kids, improve the activities that I’d share, and “quickly perfect” a routine for every site. I quickly learned that it could never be that easy. Some facilitations seemed almost perfect, while others tested me in ways I didn’t expect. For the past four years, I’ve been used to communicating with mainly college students…. it’s a whole other language when talking to kids. At times, I doubted whether or not I was progressing and getting better with my faciliations no matter what the true results were.

When I returned to my regularly-scheduled site, I thought about the first time I facilitated by myself; I couldn’t think of a single thing, though. My mind was fixated on the students and what we’d be getting into that day, especially how I could keep my headwrap on while playing freeze tag! All of the tension I built up beforehand crumbled as the students talked to me about their favorite manga, fun facts, and all of the game knowledge they could fit in one breath. At the end of the facilitation, only little boy asked me if we could have more activities next year and for me to come back a little more regularly (“because every couple weeks is a long time”).

In the beginning of the summer, I was given a huge schedule filled with all of the facilitations I would’ve completed by the end of the summer. To be honest, just looking at it took my breath away – just how was I going to complete all of these? The plethora of summer projects seemed deafeningly intimidating in the beginning, but quietly fell without me noticing. Now, I only have about 2 weeks left of summer programs. This week’s facilitations gave me a comforting wakeup call on how easily the unimportant things can come and go. Truth be told, no facilitation will be perfect, but every facilitation is an important experience. There hasn’t been a day where I have not learned (or re-learned) something from the students, and I believe that is truly the most important thing. Putting all of the extra expectations on a learning experience takes away from the true value, so I was glad to see how much the students valued our time together.