« Hello world!My Change Story!

« Hello world!

My Change Story!

Okay so I’m pretty sure this wont add to my grade seeing that half my posts if not all have been unpublished still don’t know why. But, I still wanted to write about how I spoke up for change. Well…hmmm, I kinda already gave my speech on High School and all that SWAT drama so I guess I should go with something more recent. Well along with being a full time student and a full time worker I still find time to volunteer here in New Orleans. Its not with any set groups through the school its on a daily basis whereas more groups here just do weekends or one day a week. Its kind of a personal thing that I do since I had mentors growing up and who REALLY helped me when I needed it the most. I ususally like to work with teens because I strongly feel that teen males get the least amount of attention. The youth get the attention from parents and teachers but the teens kind of just get pushed along at a certain age since “you cant teach an old dog new tricks” type of mentality. I’ve found that to be totally false and overall biased since I’ve made changes in many young guys lives. It typically takes a while for progress to start and usually starts with us playing basketball then starting some homework but after a few months change happens. I show some of these guys that I have been in their situations and usually worst when we compare “war stories” and here I am living a fairly decent life not perfect but definitely not wrong. I don’t think these young guys get the attention they really need so there needs to be somewhere to bridge the gap. I cant really talk about one instance per say because drama happens daily and there are good and bad times with many late night phone calls. I can say that from the first group of guys that I dealt with I helped one get into college. One out of a few is a change for me. He was the only one who really wanted to go but didn’t have the means or the test scores. He reminded me of myself so much and turns out he’s in school right now because he just needed a little more help in some areas. He was by far the one who was written off by many of his peers, teachers especially his family. I know one person isn’t a lot but its one more person than what was going to be in school. THE OTHERS? Well one went to graduate high school since he had been putting it off and another is in the job core. All the guys are respectable men now or at least on their way and all of them have changed my life if I haven’t changed theirs as well

Upcoming week 2…

Well week two is turning out to be productive thus far. Today, we actually began construction of our final mural and some of our art pieces. Some of the skits became finalized as to how were going to
“MC” the event. I went around and double checked every groups actual performance piece so we can form our contributions as the hosts accordingly. Today, on a side note what I feel is waaay cooler, is I found out that a lot of the students (3) were interested in Africa. So I began rambling on about the Middle East, Egyptian, Roman and various Empires. They seemed really interested and then we had a pretty detailed talk about history and his-story. I didn’t want to deviate too much from what the history books say but it was pretty cool to see where some of their heads were. All in all that was pretty interesting even though it wasn’t a part of the project I still see it as viable to learning and educational growth. On another note we really began to get to know each other more, having a little brother and being a kid in a 20 yr old body i had an intelligent conversation about cartoons/pokemon and anime.

Back to the topic….were still having trouble with students leaving early, coming after tutoring and being distracted. I am proud of the speed to which we finished our homework though, this opened the window for the talks about Egyptian history and Dragon Ball Z. With the chart to categorize each group and their projects we agreed to work hard to make the props this week and early next week so we can be on schedule for the show. So far this week has been strong and I’m looking forward to Thursday!