I survived

my first day of school! Awesome! I'm also the most tired. I'm almost certain that if I fall asleep now I literally just will not wake up until Saturday.

I feel like all day long I had so much to reflect on and right now all I want to do is sleep.

My day involved way more cats than I ever could have possibly imagined. I actually cannot escape cats. The beginning of the day was super awesome, besides the part where it was 6 AM and freezing, because I woke up to this beautiful first-day-of-school note from Dan (the guy who was awesome enough to let me live in his house for the term).

Then, when I was in the guidance office (where my desk is), somehow a conversation with a student and a teacher turned into a conversation about cats. I promise I did not instigate that. I was pretty much just listening. Still, cats. Then, that student was stapling some tissues together to make a cat (couldn't tell if she was serious or not) and I told her she should put them on the tissue box and turn the tissue box into a cat. Forgot to take a picture but there is now a cat tissue box running around in the guidance office.

In less cat-related news, I only got asked if I was a student once, and by asked I mean I had to go to the cafeteria to get a utensil for my lunch that I so thoughtfully brought from home (a.k.a. the leftover pesto pasta I made during interim), and when I was trying to leave the cafeteria with my newly acquired spork someone asked me where I was going, and I was like "woooo I'm the new person" and then we laughed and I left feeling more accomplished than I needed to feel. Small victories, man. And speaking of small victories and going places, I DID NOT GET LOST ONCE TODAY. This is almost definitely because I got people to walk me pretty much everywhere I went, although at the end of the day, after having been walked from one place I didn't know how I got to, to a second place that I didn't know how I got to, I somehow managed to find my way back to the guidance office and my stuff. So proud.

Today was both the last day of school before their spring break, and Senior Skip Day, so it was a little difficult to get a real sense of how the school functions when people are more present. It was ideal for a get-to-know-the-school day though because teachers were much more open since it was a movie-watching, hang-out kind of day, which meant I actually got to talk to the teachers and get to know them pretty well (or as well as you can get to know someone in half an hour). Getting to know the kids better is going to be great, I can already tell. I'm lucky that all the previous interns have affected the kids pretty positively, because they were all excited to meet me and didn't mind walking me places and seemed to enjoy that I was there.

Also - way more swearing and sexual innuendo than I expected, but I'm definitely okay with that. And the two guidance counselors I work the most with are hilarious. And the kids are all awesome. And I'm falling asleep. Good night.

First Day of School!

I forgot that going to high school means waking up really, really early in the morning. When you work at a high school, you have to get there before the kids do, which means that you have to wake up before it's really, really early in the morning. On the other hand, I'm kind of stoked to be an old person all term and go to bed immediately after dinner. I'm also kind of stoked to be a real person this term and make my own dinner. I'm less stoked about how my own dinners will taste given that I am good at cooking exactly two things. The great food adventure of 13S awaits...

Also, just got a free cupcake from students! Woo breakfast.

There are kids here now so I'll update this later.

away we go

Done with orientation, and in a few hours I'm driving off to my home for the next ten weeks... sort of. Turns out the school I'm working at is on break next week, and also Friday is Good Friday, so I am going to drive there, go to bed, wake up and go to school on Thursday, and then I guess hang out and explore until Friday night, when I'm getting dinner with one of the kids, and then sometime after that I'm coming back to Hanover (can't stay away, really) to do some on-campus work for the program and day trip out to see the other two interns. So I won't really be going away for another week.

I still am going to school tomorrow, and that's crazy. During orientation earlier today, one of the things we had to write was a word that described our present emotions. Mine was happy-sad. Yes, hyphenated. I'm officially the least decisive person ever to exist. It really is a mixed bag of emotions though - on one hand, I am so, so excited for this to start. After orientation-ing for three days, I feel pretty good about this and am so stoked to meet the kids and be in a school and teach people and learn from them and see what it's like to be in an underprivileged school and see what I can do to make it a better place. But I'm also sad because I don't want to leave (and I don't have to, yet, really, so there is that).

When I was younger, someone told me, or I read in a book somewhere or something, "You don't need a reason to be happy. You need a reason to be sad." I wrote about this quote already today, so I'll keep it short. I think it's a good quote. I just think it needs an addendum: When you have a reason to be sad, remember that you also have reasons to be happy. Nothing is stopping you from having happy stuff and sad stuff in your life, and it's really up to you to decide which stuff is more important.

COOL gonna go write some letters to some people and get on the road!

Report Cards

I'm currently putting together a short presentation on the school I'm working at (wooo spring break is fun!) and this is blowing my mind.

I feel like this is probably true for most states, but I haven't checked so right now I'll just talk about what I actually have researched. The state of New York gives every school a yearly report card, which deals with all sorts of stuff about the school and ultimately reports on how well the school is doing at, well, being a school. Here are a couple of things that stuck out.

From 2008-2011, the average freshman class size was about 900 students. In the same time period, the average senior class size was just over 600 students.

In my high school, if you were missing class(es), if you were absent, if something happened, people noticed. I am so interested to see what it looks like when people don't notice. That's not a thing I even knew existed.

Also from the report card, I'm learning a lot about the different levels of being a school. It also is crazy to me that America doesn't have general standards for all schools. Education is important, right? Right? We should be learning, I think. I think learning looks different for everyone, but I also believe everyone should have the opportunity to learn really well, whatever that means for them. Anyways, on this report card there's a thing called "school accountability" and there are different levels of accountability into which schools are classified. The best is "good standing," which is code-speak for your school's doing it right. Then there is "improvement," a.k.a. you could do better, but then there is also "corrective action," a.k.a. it's time to fix things. But then there is also "reconstructing." As in, there are so many things that are so deeply flawed that you need to start over, you need to fix so many things. I'm reading this thinking, why do they have so many levels? How are there schools that are so messed up that they are actually at any of these lower levels? What happened (or didn't happen, really) to cause these schools to be classified as "reconstructing"?

Also, it bothers me that the government or New York State or whoever is assessing these schools, and saying, Yep, you have work to do here, but that's apparently where it ends. How can they do that? How can they look at these schools, acknowledge that there is something seriously wrong, and then leave it at that? Why aren't they trying to do anything to change it? It's like you have a kid who really likes this one book, and that book is on the top shelf of the bookshelf, and the kid can't reach, but all the other people have done is point out that the kid can't reach the book. You'd think maybe they'd give the kid a stepstool, or some way of reaching the book, or maybe if none of that is accessible, they'd say to the kid, hey, we don't have a direct way of reaching this but maybe if you go around and collect some stuff and put it together, you'll be able to reach, or maybe if you work really hard on your parkour skills you can work together with your environment to create a way to reach the book. But none of that is happening. It's almost as if they aren't even acknowledging that the book is there at all. Ignoring the existence of the problem doesn't make it go away. Granted, they're not ignoring the problem, they're reporting it, so at least we know it exists. But I still don't see how that's any better.

Explanation

This is a blog dedicated to things that haven't happened to me yet. My goal is to update this at least weekly, and write about all of the things worth recording regarding my spring internship. When I hear internship I always think of big cities and i-banking and corporate weirdness. This isn't like that. I'm spending my spring in a school. A high school (never thought I'd be going back to one of those). I get to work with kids, which is awesome. The purpose of this blog is to reflect on that and also reflect on all the stuff I'm learning from them. I feel like all people can usually teach you a lot more than you can teach them, so I'm excited to spend a term focused on learning from more than professors. Professors are great. I just like other kinds of learning too.

So yeah. When I get closer to actually being there I'll probably write more, but that's about it for now.

Things to think about:
The high school I am working at has 3,000 kids. Holy shit.
The high school I am working at has 9 guidance counselors.
My high school had 9 guidance counselors.
But we only had 1,200 kids.
The high school I am working at has a 56% graduation rate.
56 percent.
What does it take to change that?