The World Spins Madly On.

“Night is here, the day is gone, and the world spins madly on…”

There are many times throughout the week, day, hour even, where I feel like this. City Year kind of has that affect on a person. It is my nature that I become extremely obsessed with one thing, and will not stop focusing on that one thing until I am just so sick of it that I never want to look at it again. This, unfortunately, is how I have been with some students. Until now.
Again, like so many other things in my life, come back to skating and the lessons I learned from it (another reason why sports are so important in a child’s development – they teach the child lessons they will not forget for the rest of his or her life). A person only has so much energy s/he can expend over a given time. For skating, that given time might be a senior long program, or 4:30 min. If a skater expends all of her energy in that first step sequence, she has nothing left to give for the remaining 3 minutes, where a lift, a NHSS, and a bunch more elements occur. With City Year, if a corps member expends all of his/her energy in the first three months of service, the months of January through May are going to feel MIGHTY long. The days making up those months are going to feel even longer. Pacing oneself is as important in skating as it is in City Year.
I think back especially to my junior year of college, when I had the most trouble with skating because of being on senior, having a ton of asthma issues, etc., and I think how I can relate it to my city year. You have to practice like you perform. You have to put forth 100% effort 90% of the time. While this is not ideal obviously, we are all only human, and just as our Dean of City Year, Charlie Rose, said, “You have 135 days of service left this year. Give me 130 great ones.”

It’s awkward to interrupt your own thought process, but a song just came on my iTunes as I was writing that I just HAD to put down. It’s a group of lyrics from “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons, and I think it’s a silent pledge I’m going to take for the rest of the year. It’s a pledge I’m going to make to my students.

“I will hold on hope, and
I won’t let you choke on the noose around your neck
I’ll find strength in pain, and
I will change my ways
I’ll know my name as it’s called again”

Mathapalooza!

“…No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered life, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born this way…” Lady GaGa’s anthem to individuality, also known as “Born This Way”, streamed through my semi-broken headphones as I hurtled through space from New York’s LaGuardia to Milwaukee’s General Mitchell airport. This weekend seemed like a blur. And it was a long weekend too. How did that happen?
Thursday was a whirlwind in and of itself – all of HLCS’s team was running around getting things set up for Mathapalooza, the inaugural math event at our school. There were balloons everywhere, string tangled around desks, streamers creatively hung from banisters, and plenty of sweating and stressing, but the event all came together in time. Unfortunately, I had a plane to catch, so I could only stay through the set up, but from what I understand, the school and CY MKE’s staff were very impressed with Mathapalooza and our team overall.
This is a huge step for our team I think, because we definitely came in as the underdog team. We’re the only team serving at a brand new partner school, so we’re facing frustrations the other teams aren’t in terms of getting teachers/admin to understand our role in MPS. Our school has been a SIFI (School Identified For Improvement) for at least 5 years. Mathapalooza, however, engaged over 100 students and parents, in addition to several teachers and school staff. Our principal couldn’t say enough good things – one of them being that any time we wanted to hold an event at HLCS, we had the green light, and that Mathapalooza was exactly the kind of event he imagined for his school.