Today I'm thankful to have been part of the TORCH visioning conversation for next year, as the program continues to expand and try to serve more students, while continuing to serve them well. I'm so thankful to have been able to learn from so many people in that room and all of the factors they are taking into account in consideration of how to best serve their students, from transportation to ACT prep, from college visits to financial aid, from tutoring to academic advising. And the conversation of how to get families in the loop and on board with TORCH services, as well as the basic goal of advocating for their children and being proponents of education, is so crucial, especially as many of these families are working hard to provide more opportunities for their kids. The hard part is when their hard work means they are not as present in their childrens' lives to be well-informed and invested in the day-to-day of constructive time and education for the future. One step at a time.
I'm thankful for the opportunity to be considered an artist for the Summer PLUS program that functions as a free summer camp with academic enrichment through the school district. It has been fun to be on the coordination end of recruiting artists to think of fun, low-budget art projects to do with these K-8th graders, many of whom are from low-income families and may have less exposure to art. One art teacher is working with a group to create a new design to paint a Northfield snowplow. I conscripted one of my friends to some really amazing and accessible photography projects, especially within that discipline that has so many intricacies and practices beyond the scope of your average kid picking up a digital camera or smartphone. And today I got to be one of the twelve artists that we were able to recruit through our new grant and co-teach a little Latin dance to a group of about 20 middle-schoolers! While we expected a couple more site assistants to help manage extraneous behavior so we could just focus on teaching, we tried to go with the flow to at least teach some basic rumba and cha and encourage them to get over the weirdness of, um, touching each other. Awkward. Middle school is awkward for everyone, it just is, but we tried our best to teach the kids how to have leads and follows learn decent frame to respect each other that way too. They were a squirrely crew, but I'm grateful for this opportunity to be silly with some middle schoolers and impart some of my dance love to them.
And I'm so thankful for having gotten to spend an afternoon/evening with three amazing high schoolers as I chauffeured them to take the CLEP (College Level Examination Program - had to look that acronym up!) test in their native tongue so they could put in an hour and a half of their time and test out of four semesters of college-level Spanish. Even though things didn't really go as planned (other than them rocking the test), and our evening stretched way longer than we had expected, I'm so thankful for their patience and that they did not have anything in particular to get home for. I'm thankful to have gotten to talk with them about college, life, God (for the record, I did not bring that one up, one of the students volunteered that he had been not been heading down a good path, but "God found [him]" and now he's learning more about ministry!), and US-Latin America politics. What a cool crew. Thanks God!
After a long and exhausting day, it's time to bake some Reese's surprise cupcakes - surprise in the sense that there's peanut butter snuck into the centers and also in the sense that my dad doesn't know they're coming for his birthday tomorrow!
Buenas noches, until tomorrow.
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