West Southnorth

1. What were my expectations for the day?

2. What are the high points of the day?

3. What are the low points of the day?

4. What is one experience that caused me to grow today?

5. What am I excited about for tomorrow?

1. My expectations for today were that it couldn't live up to yesterday. Not with PT moves and awesome meditation in one of our smaller sessions. I did expect to continue to grow relationships. Also, I was excited for our first time Power Greeting (something City Year does in schools where a group stands at the entrance and sings rowdy camp songs to cheer students into the school. It's super embarrassing and awkward to walk through, but you can't make it without smiling). 

2. First high point was our very first session, where we talked about Culture as an iceberg. So the parts of a person that you see when you first meet them is just the tip of the iceberg. Get it? And sometimes we make assumptions about the bottom of the iceberg based on what we see above the water. I hope you know what happens then. It begins and ends with an old lady and Rose floating away on an obviously-big-enough-for-two piece of wood. TITANICKED. But during that session, we also did a life map for ourselves and shared a part of it with the group, which was a really cool exercise. I wish I could have talked for hours with everyone about theirs, but I guess that's what the rest of this year is for. :)  Here's the picture of my life "tree" if you will. Start a conversation with me about it!

More high points! We did a session where we categorized our leadership styles based on a compass rose, so the choices were North-Action, East-Vision, South-Empathy, and West-Analysis. I came out as a West first, with South and North tied for second. It was really cool to talk to people with similar leadership styles and also hear from people with opposite leadership styles to hear their perspectives. 

After lunch, my group lead power greeting--as advertised above--and it was totally awesome. I feel like it's something you have to experience and can't be explained well here, but it's basically shouting camp songs and making it impossible to be in a bad mood as you walk down the hallway. 

The last high point was our Community Meeting led by the team leaders. They walked us through what will become a ritual for all the school teams and one of the activities was called Starfish Sharing. It basically builds off of one of the stories that City Year is based on that talks about a girl throwing starfish into the ocean one by one. A man comes up, looks at the beach filled with thousands of starfish and asks the girl, "What are you doing? There's no way you're going to be able to throw all these starfish back into the water. Why try if you can't make a difference?" to which the girl looks up, throws the starfish in the water and says, "I just made a difference to that one." BAM. Anyways, the activity is about sharing stories of students that you made a difference to, and the team leaders had awesome stories of students who were struggling either in behavior or in content areas and who had improved leaps and bounds during their year. They read letters that these kids had written to them and they were awesome. I hope I get some letters at the end of this year.

Bonus high point: We wrote appreciations to one another again today and it is quickly becoming my favorite activity. Random friendly notes to friends; what is better than that? Also, it seems people like the short hair on me! :) 

3. A low point is that one of our crazy team members decided to leave City Year. It was the one that I told you about on Tuesday. They decided that now wasn't the right time for them to take on this commitment, but they plan on joining the corps next year, which is really exciting. I'm glad I really did all that I could to support them when I knew they were struggling though, because I know I would be wondering if I could have changed their mind. No regrets! Yay! Only 10 more months to go with no mistakes! ;)

4. Something that caused me to grow today was sharing out my Life Tree. I volunteered to share knowing that I couldn't share anything but not having a plan of what part to share, so I randomly ended up sharing about my faith. It was a really cool experience because my faith has developed so much over the last four years and become something that senior-in-highschool Mae totally wouldn't recognize and would probably judge. I feel like I've come so far since then in my faith, but in most other parts of myself as well. That's what makes it so much more impressive that there are several corps members who are fresh high school graduates. They are SO BRAVE.

5. This is kind of cheating, but I am excited for tomorrow because we are getting that much closer to finding out our school teams. Pretty sure that we don't find out until Monday, but I am THAT excited! I love my Crazy Team so much, but I am getting anxious because I feel like I'm getting too attached to them to be happy working with anyone else. Sad, but true! Also tomorrow, we're breaking down City Year's Whole School Whole Child model, which has been shown to dramatically increase a child's likelihood of graduating. I'm so excited to get into the meat and potatoes of what we'll actually be doing this year!