Last weekend, City Year joined the Rotary San Antonio club (which is second largest in the WORLD!) to build a playground for a local school. It was extremely fun, and I had fantastic jobs. I split my time between drawing and painting a world map with continents on a cement slab (12' by 24') and seeing how many countries of the world we could name (would you expect anything else from me?) and playing with a ball that was taller than I was. I made some friends with some 8-year-old boys who thought that ball was the best thing they'd ever seen. All in all, the event was spectacularly well-organized, and I'm so proud of my roommate and my friends for pulling it off so flawlessly. I know they worked extremely hard planning all the activities.
School has become a lot more positive too. Don't get me wrong, class is still the very definition if chaos, but my perspective had changed. I am focused on my students' success and measure my daily impact by their improvement rather than the whole class' on-taskness (it's a word).
I am quickly becoming attached to my students for sure. Every time I take them out of class to work on something, they are excited and ready to leave that chaotic environment. I've even had to set up a rotation of other students who hassle me every day to please take them too because they want to work out there with me!
There are a million little things that fulfill me every day, like a student telling me twice that he gets to make a video in technology class because he is that excited.
Or a student saying he really likes the class common read book because the character seem really cool. And then catching that student reading the book in after school.
Or a student apologizing for being mad during class because the other students were being so rude he couldn't concentrate.
Or a student who hasn't done one iota of class work this year completing a discussion response because I told him I didn't mind if his answer had a curse word in it. He thought he was getting away with sooooo much.
Or a student saying "nice one, Miss!" when I got a question right during a literacy board game we were playing.
Or one of my students being vocally upset when I said we wouldn't be going outside today because he needed to catch up on his reading but then being comforted by the fact that we would work outside tomorrow.
Or a student who has been at loggerheads with me about being respectful all year borrowing my pencil minutes after saying, "I don't like you at all. We're not friends anymore" and then being the only one to return my pencil at the end of class!
Or today in afterschool when the corps members served as a panel for our students to ask questions about college and we actually had to cut the discussion short because they had so many questions! Excellent questions like, "do people still get bullied in college?" and, "do people sometimes drink and smoke but still do okay with their grades?" and "can you flunk?"
I love my job, even if it's hard all the time and sometimes harder than it is fulfilling in the moment. It always ends up being worth it for the students who show me that I'm not wasting my time. It's certainly going to be an interesting career!
And this morning I saw a beautiful rainbow. San Antonio is a beautiful city and I'm lucky to live here for a year.
One more funny story:
On Halloween, one of my teammates dressed as a nerd with "broken" glasses. In afterschool, a student said, "Sir, are those fake?!" And I said, jestingly, "You mean his eyes? I think those are his real eyes. Maybe his hair, that looks kind of fake..." And the student said, "You're right! It looks like a tope-y"
"A tope-y?"
"Yeah, you know, a fake hair, a tope-y"
"Ohhhhh, you mean a toupee?!"
"I guess so!"
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