catching up

So its been a little while since I wrote a real post. Today seems like as good a time as any, since I've been in the office for an hour and a half and we're not leaving for service for another half hour. We had a snow day yesterday, and Seabrook is on a two hour delay this morning. Which is why I'm at work with nothing to do.

ATR was really good. I hurt my back the first day when I went tubing. Not such a great idea. I got to spend a lot of time with Diva and Jenn, who I don't get to see very much since they live practically on the other end of the state. It was really great to have some time to catch up with them. I loved that "camp" feeling of sitting around the fire and just hanging out with people. Sara taught me to knit and we reverted to childhood with a game of cat's cradle. The second day of ATR was really intense and started with an activity called "Cross the Line." It was emotionally intense and I came to some realizations during the debrief about who and what is important to me and what I really want out of the rest of my year.

The last couple weeks have been taxing. My team isn't doing so great and there has been some drama. I look forward to the weekends... Service is going well though, and my DI team might actually have something to present at the tournament which is LESS THAN A MONTH AWAY. Holy cow. Their meeting tonight is from 2:30-6. We're feeding them dinner and driving them home. Hopefully I'll be back to the office by 7:30 or so. Just in time to drive to the airport and pick up Kayte! She's going to be here for the weekend--we're doing physical service tomorrow and then we get to spend the long weekend hanging out around the seacoast area :) Hooray!

Senior corps applications were due today. Mine is on the recruitment director's desk. We find out on March 15 who is being asked back. It will be interesting to see who is on the list.... Off to service soon. Meanwhile, have some pictures from MLK Day, which was exactly a month ago!

Photo post.

I'm way too tired to write a real post about the happenings of our Advanced Training Retreat. Maybe tomorrow I will, when I'm not crashing from consuming too much Vault Zero. But meanwhile, enjoy some pictures from ATR :)



The tubing hill. It broke me, but it was fun anyway :)



Me and Timona




Me and Sara


More tubing people


Sara is a clarinet STAR


No boating on the frozen lake, please.


Morning time on the porch with Lacy and Will


Will, my partner in crime... and DI.

Hiatus.

We're off to our advanced training retreat tomorrow morning. Three days at Camp Berea in Hebron, NH where the temperature this morning was -2 with a wind chill of -15. So if you try to reach me and I'm not responsive, that's why. My team is doing better this week, so I'm feeling pretty good about going away with them for the rest of the week. Hope I still feel that way when I get back.

Meanwhile...

Crazy City Year PT

It's the little things...

Today was not a particularly memorable or noteworthy day. It was schedule change day, and the 7th graders have an extra class this term, so the classes got split up. Now there are 5 classes of 7th graders instead of 4. It was strategic, of course, and a lot of kids lost their partners in crime. For me, this means more kids doing work and fewer kids feeding off each other's craziness. Three of my favorite kids who used to be in class together are all in separate classes now. I love it, because they don't fight for my attention--I can spend a whole class period with each kid, if I want to or if they need it.

One of those three was pointed out to me the first day that I was in Seabrook. He was the only one in the entire grade that Mr. Smith pointed out and said, he needs your help, but if you don't think you can handle him, no one will blame you. This was terrifying. The one kid in the whole grade that no one can deal with. But because his two friends latched onto me, he kind of did too. Today he was so happy to have my undivided attention. We spent almost the whole hour together. It's hard to get him to focus, but when he does, he really gets it. And he's interested and asks questions. Yes, he is distracted by girls and wants me to pass notes for him (I told him he can pass his own notes, but not until he finishes the class work). But I don't understand why teachers think he is so difficult and unmanageable. When did I become someone who can bond with the unruly kids?

I always intend to post during the week but always wind up on Sunday night having not posted at all.

Monday was MLK day. It was so icy and awful that morning--we were supposed to have about 400 people in attendance, and we wound up with just over a hundred. Considering the horrible weather, it was still a pretty decent turnout. We still got a lot of great people to show up--the mayor of Portsmouth was there, as were both of the women who were scheduled to speak, and the Leftist marching band played! Apparently we were on the evening news as well. The community art project went really well too. Lots of kids showed up to paint, the City Year staff and corps participated, and lots of other community members too. We wound up having extra canvases and sent some home with a couple local teachers to work on the project with their students. I'm going to take the canvases that are left to after school next week when we combine our program in Seabrook with the Hampton after school program.

Tuesday we were on a two hour delay because the roads were still really icy and gross. We wound up doing a debrief of the day and then unloading the vans and stuff. Our site has a pallet of goldfish crackers courtesy of Pepperidge Farms, and we wound up building a giant fort out of them in the GT and then loaded them all in the back of a 15 passenger van to take them to our offsite storage space. Once we got to the storage space and its super icy parking lot, I climbed in the back of the van and spent a good 15 minutes throwing huge boxes of goldfish crackers at Sara while she serenaded me and danced to silly songs on the radio. Yes, this is actually part of my job. Will and I had a good meeting with our DI team to work on the team challenge--it was the first time that we'd actually started serious work on the challenge.

Wednesday was a rough day. I made it clear to my team on Tuesday that I was leaving the Timberland parking lot at 7:35, because Stephen and I were chaperoning the band field trip, and I didn't want City Year to be the reason that my kids were late for the trip. I knew that two teammates would be out, and Sara is in the office on Wednesdays, but I still was expecting a team of five for the day. In the morning, two of my teammates called to tell me they wouldn't be in, and then the other two called to tell me they'd be late. 7:30 comes and goes, I circled with the Hampton team because I didn't have a team of my own. 7:35, 7:40. Nothing. If I had stuck to my word, I would have been the only member of my team to show up to school. But I waited for my other two teammates. Stephen and I went on the field trip, which left Matt as the only member of the team to provide in-class support on Wednesday. The field trip was AMAZING. The kids were on their best behavior and had a blast. They got to play their music for the UNH music students, had sectionals with music students, and listened to the UNH wind symphony. We went on a campus tour (even though it was one of the coldest days I've ever experienced in my life) and had lunch in the food court. We got back to school and realized there was NO plan for after school. Luckily I have an amazingly creative team leader, and Sara came and saved our asses. She basically ran our whole after school program because we wouldn't have known what to do... At the very end of the day I wound up having this really intense conversation with one of the after school kids. It was one of the kids that I barely even knew before that day, but I guess it was good that she felt like she could open up to me. It was really awful, but everything wound up being ok in the end.

Thursday I spent the day doing MLK workshops with my seventh graders. Instead of their normal social studies class, Matt and I faciliated a workshop about seeing the world from another perspective. The workshops went pretty well overall. The kids seemed mostly engaged (which is about all you can ask for). One of the teachers aides that has been notoriously critical of City Year and had particularly hard on me in class told me that we did a really great job. Will and I had a great day of DI and played improv games with our girls for almost 2 hours. They had a blast (and so did we!). We had a really intense team meeting after the programming, but it needed to happen. I ended an already long day by going to the band and chorus concert with Sara. It was especially amazing because the chorus sang Christmas songs... in January. Oh, Seabrook.

Friday was not terribly notable. Office work blah blah blah. Seabrook team lived up to our reputation and made ridiculous posters while we were supposed to be doing something mildly serious. Finally got to have a relaxing weekend of doing nothing. And suddenly its Sunday night and almost time for bed....

Friday was quite possibly the most amazing service prep day ever. We had a community meeting in the morning, which I ran. Good times. Then Sara and I collected sticks in the woods at Timberland for the dreamcatchers craft table. I had lunch with Robin, my mentor. In the afternoon we had a short meeting to talk details about the projects that we're running at the MLK day event, and then I didn't really have anything else I needed to do for the day, because all the supplies for my project were ready. So instead I got out the paints and canvases and collected corps members to paint example portraits for my Faces of the Community project.


Pam, Lee, Lacy, and Me :)




Angela working hard on her masterpiece



Sara, deep in artistic thought





Portraits of the Artists :)


My favorite thing about City Year is that I can come in and say "Hey, can we do this project?" and two weeks later, we do. Tomorrow is the big day!!

Getting back in the swing of things.

I'm beginning to remember why I was so tired for all of fall. City Year is tiring.

MLK Day is going to be amazing. Last week I was afraid I wasn't going to be able to contribute much. I was totally wrong. Now I'm spearheading the community art project, which has in the last three days become the main focus of our afternoon activities. The idea (which was stolen with love and great thanks to Michelle) is "Faces of the Community"... I ordered 200 small canvases in three different sizes, and we're going to have everyone paint a self-portrait. The canvases are going to be attached together (with a nail gun, I think) kind of three-dimensionally, so that they are kind of overlapping with some in front of or behind others. I went to the Portsmouth library today, where the finished product will be displayed, where Jen and I were supposed to meet with the library director. She wasn't there, so we just kind of scoped out the place. We might try to build some kind of structure so it can be a free standing display, with canvases on both sides, back to back. I'm hoping we can get a big section of wall in the entrance to the children's section. It's the perfect size, and the perfect location.

Destination Imagination is good, but there's so much to do. So much pressure for the program to go well in Seabrook this year, and not much support from the school. We're having trouble finding and keeping kids. But after a bit of a freak out this morning, Will and I spent the afternoon organizing and planning and whatnot. We'll see how many kids we get tomorrow, and hopefully we can still take a couple of them to team training on Saturday.

After school was rough today. For many reasons. Not the least of which was when a girl got kneed in the nose. Luckily it seemed to still be in one piece, so I took her to the teacher's room to get ice and let her sit with me for the rest of the afternoon instead of participating in the program.

I was ready for bed by about 7:30 this evening, so I've officially gone from feeling three hours behind the time zone I'm in, to feeling three hours AHEAD of the time zone I'm in. So much for jet lag.