Snow Day and Breaking Down Barriers

This past week was supposed to begin with a grand celebration. Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day and many people have a day off from work that they spend getting deals and sleeping in. At City Year New Hampshire, MLK Day means Young Heroes Opening Day. Young Heroes is a CY program that brings middle schoolers together on Saturdays to teach them about social justice issues such as homelessness and get them involved in service projects related to those topics. We had planned to meet in Portsmouth on Monday to kick off the Young Heroes program, march through the streets in honor of King's desire for justice and end the afternoon with a service project. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans. On our way to work, my roommate Karibean and I discovered that the march was cancelled due to the heavy snowfall. This was a very disappointing development. We were both looking forward to an intense and memorable day and instead, we had to turn around. There was a chance that we would be called in later in the day but the weather was just too bad.

Tuesday was a good start to the school week. We were supposed to start working on book two, focusing on geometry, in math class. The students are starting to work on angles and I wanted to give them a warmup that would serve as a bridge between solving equations and angles. Unfortunately, I didn't get to the classroom on time and we spent much of the period on older material. We didn’t start working on book two so it had to wait for later in the week.

We have changed the breakdown of our afterschool teams to better work in our Homework Help program. We now have someone from both sixth and eighth grade staying behind on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Three other corps members go to Seacoast Youth Services to assist with their afterschool programs. I am the eighth grade corps member who switched so I was at Homework Help on Tuesday. I had a lot of success with DC. He had been distracted from his math homework, but I got him back on target. He is a very intelligent young man but has some trouble taking instruction. I think that I am getting better at working with him and keeping him from shutting down. I'm hoping that I can get him to see it's important to work with others and not disengage completely when confronted with a challenge.

I had hoped that Wednesday would bring a strong start to the next part of math class. The warmup problem that I had prepared was very overwhelming. It was a relatively complex equation involving angles and most of the students gave up when they first looked at it. I salvaged the situation as best as I could; I wrote down all of the steps and asked the students to copy it into their notes. Still, I was afraid that I had turned them off of angles – a dreadful idea since they hadn't even begun studying them yet. But as with all things, there was a positive side. The students began using their notebooks for the first time, developing good habits for future lessons.

Throughout Wednesday afternoon, I felt overwhelmed combating inappropriate comments. The eighth graders are learning about Israel and Palestine in social studies class while reading Night by Elie Wiesel in Language Arts. I have heard too many comments from students claiming that "Why are we studying this? This isn't about America." Also, I’ve heard students joke about the Holocaust films we've been watching. This is incredibly distressing. I want the students to understand that it's jokes like these that lead to a tolerance of or blind eye to more severe acts of disrespect and prejudice. I complained about this situation to my roommates on the drive home. Instead of merely comforting me, Moshe suggested that I present a workshop on intolerance. I'm glad that I now have something productive to work on instead of merely shouting into the wind.

When I went into math class on Thursday, I was better prepared for the day's warmup. I had simpler exercises for the students that were more closely related to the work they had done the day before. When the students said they were confused by the directions, I referred them to the notes that they had written the day before. I think we are on a good path now; they’re learning that their notes are important and will help them in their work. If I can help them become more organized, they will be better prepared for high school.

Thursday's afternoon brought a thrilling meeting of the Seabrook Destination Imagination team. We have had a lot of fluidity in team members and participation this year. I hope that we have finally settled down and gotten our team lineup complete. The team was given an instant challenge to prepare them for the day of the competition. This team has never before worked together so well or been so creative. Sandra, the other corps member leading this team, and I were both incredibly proud. Unfortunately, team communication broke down and WS, one of the team members, said he is going to quit. Another team member, AC, consistently wants to be in control and he butts heads with WS. WS said he would quit last week and I am concerned that our team still has some issues to address. If WS quits, it won't solve the problem; the two boys will not have learned how to work with others.

I told my roommate Karibean that I wasn't sure how Friday would go. I always look forward to Fridays because the whole corps is reunited after a long week, and for the most part they're a lot of fun. Still, they have the potential to put me in a weird, pensive mood. In the first few hours of Friday, I was convinced that it was a terrible day. We had an activity in the morning to teach us about the history of social movements; it took the form of the game show "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?" The setup of the game was hilarious and very well done, but when my team lost I became angry and irate. I am a terrible loser at times, and I just shut down. I know that "it's just a game" and the point of the activity was to learn about social movements, not win, but for some reason I got into a very unpleasant place.

Luckily, I work for City Year, an organization that doesn't let that mentality fester. Whenever I talked with someone about what happened, they didn't brush aside my feelings or try to tell me empty words of comfort. Sometimes people go through rough patches and that's okay. After work, I talked with Dylan, my first friend at CYNH. We were the only ones at the weekly meeting of C Y We Think, a philosophy discussion group. We talked about how CY cares about human beings. City Year is full of people who will let you express your feelings without judging you, without making you feel like you're wrong for being unhappy. I am incredibly lucky to be working for an organization that values me because I'm a human being, not because I can do something to benefit it. I am surrounded by vast amounts of goodness and support. It's mindblowing how fortunate I am to be here, and I'm looking forward to giving back, to other people at CYNH and the children I work with, that goodness and support.