In which Jake emerges from the woods

Hey everyone, I'm actually alive! Exceedingly lazy, but alive. Sorry for the lack of updates, it's been a weird/long week.

I write this two days after returning from Basic Training Retreat, one of the final elements of CY training. For a day and two nights, we all decamped to Camp Vacamas, near West Milford, NJ, for some serious team building. Some activities during our time there included:

• a "challenge course" with such activities as getting the entire team across a pit on a tire swing, having the entire team scale a wall, and getting the entire team through a series of tires without anyone touching the ground.
• having everyone on the team complete the sentences "If you really knew me..., If you really, really knew me..., and If you really, really, really knew me..."
• having everyone on the team be subject to a Q&A period from the rest of the team
• several lectures on active listening and maintaining team peace, while utilizing constructive conflict
• a talent show, the highlight of which was one of the team leaders singing opera
• the first alcohol-free dance I've been to in a long time
• so many chants, calisthenics, and yelling in general that my voice was hoarse for the final day
• me getting the opportunity to read the Word of the Day at Friday's morning rally. I don't remember what the word was, but the important part was that I got to yell really loud.
• not getting eaten by bears
  

It was a really creative way to build trust while still making sure that it wasn't a total chore. Also, I learned that some of my teammates in the Bronx are excellent poker players. Gamblers beware.

One more week of training remains. Tomorrow we get our uniform pieces, and later in the week we'll all be waking up really early to go mug for the camera on the various morning shows that originate in New York. Friday is Opening Day, featuring keynote speaker Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, and Monday is the first day of full-time service in the schools.

Coming tomorrow: pics of me in the uniform. Brace for fashion!

First day of school!

I'm going to ignore the mostly dull training sessions that we've had over the last few days and focus on what was easily the week's highlight: visiting PS 333/335 for the first time.

We had our first of what will be many 7:45 AM meetups. After waiting for some lost team members to find their way, we walked into the school and into the lion's den of an elementary school cafeteria. A new CY program this year is called "Morning Greeting," which allows us to devise a way of saying hello to as many students as possible before class begins each day. Some teams are stationing people outside the front doors to do this as students enter, but we're trying the strategy of roaming the cafeteria looking for kids to talk with.

CY worked in this same school last year, and our team leader had been a corps member then. Many kids recognized her, and saw our logo shirts. Thus began the chorus of "hey, City Year!" Everyone wanted to talk to us. Looks like last year's team succeeded in making an impression. This might be a tough act to follow.

Around 8:15, we joined the students for a morning assembly, where we are all introduced. There was some rowdiness, but nothing beyond what I've seen before from 4th/5th graders. This was our first encounter with the principal, Mr. Wright, who definitely seems to command the attention and respect of his students. We heard about new ambitious goals for the school's reading program, and how students could earn prizes through good behavior. In fact, our next task of he day was setting up the StarBucks store, where student can redeem behavior credit for rewards. If they're a perfect little angel, they might even get a bike.

In a meeting later, we got to hear a lot about the school's reading program. I'd explain it, but I was running on four hours or so of sleep, and I suspect our entire team will need a refresher next week. This job is going to reignite my caffeine addiction from college. I did gather that the program is designed to see how much students are actually learning and how much they're just memorizing.

We have another day at the school on Monday, where we'll be spending some time with the younger kids and meeting more teachers. We may finally get to sit in on a class and see how things are run in there. This is all buliding up to October 5, which is our first official day of service in schools. The day's approaching rather quickly. Hard to believe that a month ago I was impatient for CY to hurry up and begin.

Next up: the Starfish Corps. Stay tuned.

And the winner is...

...PS 333/335 in Longwood. For those of you paying attention, that's the school I was visiting and reporting on yesterday.

Tomorrow we go inside for the first time, which means waking up quite early. Time to get used to it, I suppose. I honestly do not have the energy to write up a longer post today, but I'll have something up about the first visit.

A history lesson, and a chance to explore

Administrative note: I have fixed the commenting settings so that you no longer need a Google account to leave a message. Once again, I encourage anyone who's found this blog and likes what they read to leave something. I'm told I do, in fact, have readers! It lets me know that someone's reading my work, which is always nice. And now, back to our show.

Today we did something that I think we should have done on day one: get an overview of the South Bronx's history. Through narration and a slide show, we went from the area's early history as a Jewish center to its very diverse mix today. The most striking images came from the "Bronx is Burning" era of the mid to late 1970's, when landlords would torch their buildings rather than repair them. In the "after" photos, you could tell us that they had been taken in post-World War II Europe, and the only giveaway would be the models of automobile visible.

This presentation also coincided with a litany of depressing statistics about the current state of the South Bronx. The area outpaces NYC averages in diabetes, obesity, health problems, asthma, poverty, and every negative indicator you could think of. School are crowded, families are poor, and so much can seem hopeless. For an organization that had spent so much time filling us with hope that we could affect something, it was an odd change in tone.

Tuesday afternoon was dominated by a field project. Each team was given detailed information on one of the schools that we'll be serving, along with a video camera and instructions to prepare a five-minute presentation on the school and the surrounding environment. Our school was PS 333/335, two schools under one roof in the neighborhood of Longwood. The mayor's report on these schools had painted a rather rosy picture of them, which we'll be unable to evaluate until we're allowed past the front gate. Our report focused on the challenges faced by many schools in the area: noise, pollution, and a negative surrounding environment. Liquor stores abounded, and the one store advertising fruits and vegetables being available was locked shut.

There was a positive spin on this, though. A beautiful park lies across the street from the school. Next door, a space that had formerly been overgrown and taken over by rats has been turned into an attractive community garden. The "playground," an expanse of plain asphalt, has been beautified with a brightly-colored map of the United States. Our team leader informed us that this had been the work of the previous years CYNY corps. We saw the kids come out for recess, and they were as high-energy as you'd expect elementary school kids to be. It was awfully nice to see that they hadn't been beaten down by their environment.

This was the closest we had come to stepping inside a school and getting to work. Tomorrow, I will find out which school I'll be working at, and who will be on my team. Despite the day's presentations having a notably negative tone (as might be expected), it was nice to go home thinking of the beauty that I saw in the park, and the energy of the students. We may have a lot of challenges ahead of us, but we haven't been set an impossible task.

Tomorrow's a big day. Updates to follow. Thanks for reading.

Service begins/Week 2 in review

We finished the second week pretty strong. The highlight of Thursday was learning about service days - days when we go outside the schools and work on a day-long project. Often, these service days are done in partnership with various companies who have paid for the privilege of spending the day with us. On these days, corps members become Project Coordinators, leading a team of corporate volunteers in various tasks.

Thursday's longest session was dedicated to this. We first got a briefing as a big group, then rotated through three stations, teaching us how to lead the group, how to perform basic construction techniques, and how to run a painting station. This part made me a bit nervous; anyone who knows me knows that I am far too clumsy to be trusted with a pushpin, let alone a circular saw. I expect to lose at least one limb through the course of this year. Or at least spill paint all over my pants.

Friday was our first day of real service, in honor of the 9/11 national day of service. We had originally scheduled to paint a shed at a boat-building organization called Rocking the Boat, but rainy weather put the kibosh on that. Instead, we headed to World Visions, a worldwide relief organization that, among other things, puts together care packages for needy children. Our team spent the day in their warehouse, sorting goods, assembling packages, and doing some heavy lifting while we were at it. My muscles are positively bulging now. Along the way, we got to know members of other teams, and meet some local high school students that were joining us for the day. They were all rather quiet, but I hope they keep this up. Whenever people ask me why I joined City Year, I tend to point back to my high school's community service program as a beginning.

Week 3 is about to begin. Lots of ambiguously titles training sessions, but the highlight should be finding out who is on our permanent teams. Updates to follow.

Recapping the last two days

My goal here is to not be lazy and actually update the blog regularly. I won't let myself slip into bad habits!

We're now halfway through our second week of training and prep. Things are starting to get a bit more specific, as we've largely moved on from the talk about philosophy and more into how said philosophy is applied once we get to work. On Monday, CY brought in an external trainer to discuss how to deal with problem behavior. Her session was a big hit, as she worked to actively engage us, and had us do some group activities that turned out to be real helpful. We broke down problem behaviors into several categories, and discussed different ways we might handle various situations.

Tuesday also meant goodbye to the original teams that we had gotten to know so well. I was shuffled into a new team, half of whose members were teammates last week. Odd system. Still, the team seems to be working well so far. Every day, I get more and more curious what our final teams are going to look like.

Today featured two highlights: an 8 AM appointment in Brooklyn to get fingerprinted, and the first in-depth exploration of what in-school programs looks like. The fingerprinting was uneventful, although we're told that yesterday's session was chaos. The main session featured a breakdown of CY's Whole School, Whole Child theory (abbreviated WSWC, pronounced "wiz-wik"). Our goal is to be a constant presence during and after the school day, helping to contribute to the development of the child in and out of school, and making sure they're on the track to staying in school. We ran through an number of activities that had been used in the past, categorizing them all based on whether they were meant for an individual or a group, and whether they were meant for everyone or just children who had begun to show signs of trouble.

That's the short version of a two-hour session, and I honestly don't have the energy to type up all the details. Still, I hope readers are getting an idea of what training is like. Leave a comment if you're reading, and thanks for checking in.

Linkage

Sorry, no new substance in this post, but one of my teammates put together a video montage of our first week that's pretty neat. You might even catch a glimpse of me in there!