Week #13

Monday: Whew! What a day! I started off at Manual High School in the morning. Another intern and I did another presentation about Sexually Transmitted Infections and Teengage Pregnancy. (I got to do the fun part with STI's.) All in all, the presentation went well. Most of the students in the class were attentive and I felt like most of them picked up at least one new thing from the presentation that they didn't know before.

After that, I headed to a middle school on the eastside to co-facilitate a grief and loss group. This was their first day back from spring break and the school has undergone some construction so things were a little out of order when we arrived. We spent about ten minutes rounding the students up for the group, but then we got started. We started with an icebreaker game and then we laid out the rules and regulations of the group. We also asked the group members to sign confidentiality agreements so that we could ensure that they understood how important it was to keep everything said in the group confidential. We explained what activities we would be doing throughout the group and gave them the schedule for the next five sessions and their journals. We are going to use memory journals to let the students in the group express themselves and get the ball rolling on different discussions. I felt like the first session went pretty well and we figured out some things that we should do differently for next time.

Tuesday: I went to a workshop in the morning for Technology and Advocacy at the Julian Center. I am pretty sure that the title was "Keeping up with the Techies". I thought it was a very interesting presentation about technology and the different ways it can be used to help and hurt clients, particularly those victims of domestic violence. I can definitely say that I learned several things from this workshop. The second part was dedicated to confidentiality from a legal standpoint with abusers and victims from which I also learned many new things. The workshop ran way over its time so I was not able to make my second appointment of the day with the Covering Kids and Families Program. Last week, I got to work in the the building with some of the ladies and gentlemen who happened to be in the center on Tuesday afternoon. They showed me how they do some of the intake information and enter it into the database, but we only had a few walk-ins.
Course Objective # 4: While I was at Covering Kids, I did get a chance to speak with a client from Africa who had come in to fill out some paperwork. The client was working, but had recently lost their job. The client was also a student at a nearby college which I thought was interesting. The client said that they had to go slowly in school because when they first came to this country, their English was not very good. I thought it was pretty awesome that the client was working so hard to further their education and overcome the language barriers that they encountered.

I blogged about an ethical dilemma for last week's post, but here is another concern that I have. I have been doing some work in different IPS High Schools and have found out why IPS schools have such a high drop out rate. I have a few different theories, but most of them involve the fact that the students are treated as if they are incompetent. I was in a school recently talking to the students in a class for quite awhile. At first, they were loud and rowdy, but after about half the class was over, most of them were asleep. I told the students not to fall asleep on me. I heard the teacher make the comment that it might be better for them to be asleep than to be loud again. I don't know about that. My purpose there was to teach them. I can't teach people who are asleep. How do the teachers do it everyday? I know that teaching in IPS schools is a tough job, but I would like to think that not everyone has lost hope for their students. My high school had high expectations of their students and I cannot imagine going to class and it be acceptable for students to sleep during class. Why are our expectations so low of these students? Perhaps if we demand more, we just might get it more often. Kids are kids. They are going to push buttons to see what they can get away with, but why are they allowed to get away with so much? Please don't misunderstand, I am not blaming our teachers for the low graduation rate in our IPS schools. This is a problem that cannot be blamed on any one particular source. Parents have a role in their child's learning too. The whole community has a role in their school's performance. I just feel that if we expected more, we might get more from our students.