boston children's choir

alright. so last night was dr. carol johnson's swearing in as the new superintendent of the boston public schools at trinity church. and of course, the boston CY corps was there in full-uniform (we looked good) and in full-force. it was basically a night of really fabulous music. and the boston children's chorus doing some fabulous a capella. and i can't let that moment go unnoticed. so while it was ridiculously hot in there and we were there an hour early, and i sat next to sara and matt, (my teammates) who is basically like a CY celebrity because both of his brothers did CY here and they all look alike so the board members are like, you look really familiar, we met some ladies behind us and one in front of us. we fanned ourselves a lot with the programs and then at the end everyone sang this little light of mine. a third grader spoke very eloquently, but also, a parent from the william monroe trotter elementary school spoke and we were very excited, because that is our service partner!

and today was the last day of training. tomorrow is our red jacket dedication ceremony. and friday is city year boston opening day. my parents are coming up, which i think is really fabulous and they are going to come to service on friday after the ceremony which is nice of them and then i am going out to springfield with them, which is not so fab, but i would like to get to spend time with them. its incredible to think that its already been a month. and also, rent is due on monday...

bring it on!

tracey, tommy and i at back bay waiting for the orange line

so tonight was our first big thing as champion engagement coordinators. i know i mentioned it before but the reason its called champion is because at city year we call our corporate sponsors champions... like they are champions of our cause. anyway, tommy, tracey and i all had to do our testimonials tonight in front of a bunch of people from T-Mobile Boston. it was incredible. they really responded to what we were saying. and we were all so fabulous. and we also got to wear our uniform -- which was the first time we got to wear it in public for an actual city year event, because most of the corps doesn't have their uniform.

earn your boots - the process by which corps members earn their uniforms, symbolically and literally. we all have to recite the pledge to our PMs (program managers) and then with our teams demonstrate a quality, spirited and creative PT routine in front of our villages from BTR.

my team hasn't had the opportunity to earn our boots yet, but we are going to rock tomorrow, i am sure. but because we had this commitment with T-Mobile tonight, we all got our uniforms on friday. i have to say, we all look fabulous, so crisp and clean. that won't last long, but i got a picture of it to remember our first time.


my testimonial (with some personal info out)

Good evening, my name is Pamela and I am a first year corps member on the Upromise Team serving in the Roxbury and Grove Hall communities. I just graduated from the College of William & Mary in May and I knew that I wanted to do something different, so while my friends were getting consulting jobs, I started to think about what really inspired me.

I had heard about City Year when I was still in high school, but I went to college because that was what everyone did at my high school. When it came time for my brother to graduate from the same high school, he applied to colleges reluctantly. I talked to him about the possibility of taking a year off and I told him about City Year, not knowing that he would take me seriously. My brother served in New Hampshire in 05-06 and when I was reluctantly applying for jobs after college, he talked to me about City Year. He encouraged me to do what I felt was right, not what society thought college graduates should do. He said, Pam, you’re only young once and I kind of felt like he was onto something.

So here I am. I have to admit, I was nervous when I flew up here and was living on my cousin’s couch for the first few days of training. I hadn’t met my roommates except through e-mail, I only half knew what I had signed up for and I could carry all of my belongings through the city of Boston on my own. I’d been exposed to the City Year culture before because I had gone to New Hampshire while my brother was serving and been an external volunteer at their camps but it was completely different to be in it myself.

Lat Thursday, I went to my school for the first time. My first impression of my 5th graders was that they wanted to kill each other and possibly me. As I sat down at the kid-sized table, it dawned on me that these were my 5th graders and I would be working with them day in and day out for the next ten months. My kids.

Throughout training, the directors tell you that you are a part of something larger than yourself. We talk about the national service movement and our role as part of City Year as corps members, but none of that really clicked for me until we were doing Physical Training for the first time in Copley Square. As we were learning the pledge, even though we were reading it off of note cards, it was incredible to hear 140 voices reciting the pledge in unison.

This year I will be a part of something larger than myself and I am proud to be able to dedicate a year of my life to service.

political struggles

i spent the majority of last night, when i was not busy practicing stepping in the street with chidi, discussing politics with a right wing man in my corps. i never realized how radical i was (and i don't even consider myself radical) until we started conversing. i like that elements of CY culture have come out, like saying, i must respectfully disagree to every statement that i said. it fired me up to talk to him. i invited him to this talk i am going to in october at the jamaica plain social forum. it's called 10 myths about immigration, presented by aviva chomsky. he got my number, shook my hand and said, i'm down, as long as it doesn't turn me liberal. bradley said i was trying to make a convert. i have realized i might be a socialist. but i have to figure out what that means before i go around declaring that.

he talked a lot about upholding democracy. and about how our nation is being threatened. our new roommate jessica is also very conservative. she's the southerner in our real world housing situation. last night i also blew up at colin because he has no respect for the fact that bradley had gone to bed. colin is loud. and he comes over uninvited, but he is a 2nd year corps member.

jessica's parents drove from tennessee and brought her a full size bed, and four huge plastic boxes full of kitchen supplies. she's still taking classes to graduate this december and she is pretty excellent. i think she was angry that we were having our little political spiel last night and she avoided it entirely.

taking it back to the fifth grade

we rode in and got to school at around 7:04am. i say around because with all the stops on the bus route, it could've been later, but that's the time the website said we would get there. shalon brought us dunkin donuts for breakfast. and there is literally a dunkin donuts on every corner of boston, but it was super nice to just be able to run out the door instead of being like, ok well i have to wake up to make oatmeal and wash the pot and wash the bowl i eat out of and the spoon.

school is crazy. its organized in pods but as of right now i have no clear system for navigating the pods. i feel like we are walking through a caterpillar's body or something. also some of the doors are push and some are pull and most of the ones that are pull i ran into and the push ones i tried to pull. go figure. we got to spend an hour with our classroom today.

the fifth grade is ridiculous. my entire class is mostly boys, a few girls -- all african american and then one little redheaded white boy. its weird to me because i'd never seen that dynamic before. in all the schools i went to it was the other way around. all white kids, a few black/brown kids. my class is out of control. they yell a lot and like to threaten each other with death. but i learned 3 names today, so that was good. benjamin talks a lot and his handwriting is very big for the 5th grade. daikari (i think thats how you spell it) is apparently usually really bad until someone comes to watch him (that's where i come in). and charles just needs encouragement. so i made some progress. after school we went into the community and it was pretty excellent. we just walked around and went to the Y and a neighborhood organization called project right! and then we went to lunch. after lunch to the neighborhood library.

but the most exciting part of today was that i finally made it to the DTA (department of transitional assistance) on mass ave. and i qualified for food stamps, which is amazing because i didn't have four paystubs or anything and i had to print my bank info from online. and not only that but even though we went 18 minutes before they closed, bradley and i still managed to get the food stamps debit cards and emergency assistance -- so my the money on my the EBT (food stamps debit) kicks in on saturday. its such a huge burden lifted off my shoulders.

first day at school
upromise. pinkies up.

actually going to school!

this is the first time that i haven't woken up till my alarm went off and also the first time i went back to sleep for another 10 minutes. i think that i need to get to bed earlier. erin, sara and k-roy are asleep downstairs so i think that i am going to go wake them up stat because we gotta go soon. here we go! (said slick rick style)

stomp clap slap

i learned how to step today.

also, BPS (boston public schools) teachers came in to do literacy training with us. i think if i have to sit in chairs in the MLK space one more day i am going to die. i need to post a picture of the MLK space up here i think though, because its been such a huge part of training.

we also learned how to write afterschool lesson plans for the starfish programs and unit plans. thankfully i am not the executive coordinator for the starfish program at our school, matt is.

today i found out i got the champion engagement coordinator position that i applied for last week!! so exciting. basically it means that i am the go-to person on the team that deals with our team sponsor. our team sponsor is upromise, which should be fun. i have my first CEC event this sunday by doing my (as of right now, non-existent) testimonial at a T-Mobile event. T-Mobile is one of our national sponsors -- they give us phones. and because its a big event i might get my uniform early!!! so excited for that. if not, then i'll have to go out and buy some shoes because i dont have any business casual shoes with me. i dont know what i was thinking when i packed. i'll probably hit the thrift stores though, definitely not a real store.

we got our first paycheck today and it was, disappointingly small. but i am ok with that.

back at the office

my street has a little too much action at night. which is why i can't sleep.

but back to BTR. basically, i thought i would be able to write about every day, but i am going to write really quickly about the most salient points because it is way too difficult to cover what i am going to call the entire sensation that was BTR.

we did a lot of workshops that challenged people to open up to each other, to question each other, to work towards educating themselves, towards realizing we have a lot of work to do with ourselves before we start working with the kids, and basically, to bring together a group of 142 (now 141, someone dropped out today) individuals that know nothing about each other in a short amount of time. i dont think we could have developed the camaraderie that we did in four days back at the office, but we managed to do it isolated in the woods, and i am pretty psyched for my corps.

we ate a lot of crazy camp food, did a lot of team building, did some service at the camp where we do BTR (my team helped to build a fence).

upromise william monroe trotter elementary school team serving
in the roxbury and grove hall communities

myself, kevin/r-roy (behind the pole) and matt on the right -- setting a post

i have come to the realization that even though the nametags that we wear every day are dorky, they are still super useful. it is nice to hear my name in our interactions, even with people that i don't know very well but recognize their faces.

so now we are back at the office doing more fabulous training, except it is really hard to sit still all day. i am glad that we will be prepared when we enter the schools because that was one of my biggest fears about teach for america, not being adequately prepared. today the MBTA people came to talk about safety and our role as ambassadors on the T. we get passes to ride around for free, even though they take a deposit out of our accounts. so at the end of the year we get the money back if we haven't lost our T passes. which is pretty nice if you think about all the money we could spend on transportation a month. not to mention 10 months.

on thursday we get to go to our school and visit in the community and do our PT out there. hopefully one day i will get to take a good picture of PT being done so i can put it up here. opening day is coming up for city year in a week and a half and i can't even believe it. our first day of after school is the 25th, which is like, next week!!

returning from BTR

BTR (basic training retreat) was hard. we woke up at early morning time to get to the office before 6:30am on monday because on time is late, at least, according to my crazy team program manager (shalon chester). shalon is named after an alien. we rode on the bus for two hours into western Mass, which for me is just about like telling me that i am going to colorado or something. i had no idea where we were and because i passed out for the entire ride i didn't really see the road signs or anything.

during the first week of BTA (basic training academy) we were in crazy teams which are named after boston neighborhoods. i was on the mattapan crazy team and so on the bus we were organized by crazy teams still. however, you are supposed to find out your permanent teams at BTR, so after our welcome to camp beckett (a YWCA camp, YMCA, something), we were all given pieces of cut up pictures by our crazy team program managers with instructions to find other people with pieces that fit. i was hoping to get on the boston civic engagement team (which mostly deals with physical service and engaging our sponsors) but alas, i was placed on an elementary school team. however, it was my second choice and only because the program manager is.... SHALON! my crazy team PM so it made my life easier not having to adjust to a new PM or senior corps member (they are like assistant PMs). so we met our new, permanent teams for our flagship service.

flagship service - our year-long commitment (in-school/after-school, young heroes, city heroes, and civic engagement) in the national service movement as city year corps members

and then we took a lot of pictures. my team is pretty excellent, despite the fact that i was really upset (but didn't show it) that i didn't get my first choice team. i'm one of the oldest corps members, along with matt. we are both older than jessica, who is our senior corps member (SCM). then erin, who went to school at UNC-charlotte for a couple years and then decided she wanted to take a year off. then there's k-roy (kevin roy, but he goes by k-roy), who is a second year corps member. basically, he loved the CY experience so much that he came back in the same position as a first year corps member. then we have three recent high school grads (j-dot, ashley, deshawn) who are all from the boston area originally. i like that we are so diverse in just about everything that we are.

after we got our teams we had an hour one.

hour one - an hour in which the PM and SCM lay down the rules/expectations for being on their team and where they tell us about our service and anything else that is vital to being on the team.

we all got divided into villages by team. the villages were named spirit, discipline, purpose, and pride, just like what is on the back of our quarter-zip sweatshirts when we get our uniform. my village was the discipline village. the first day we had a workshop on the privilege line and oppression. the privilege line went like so:

1) we all went outside and stood in a long line, shoulder to shoulder.
2) the faciltators read questions outloud twice and we either took steps forwards or backwards.
3) people got reallly separated. i was towards the middle-back.
4) after we all looked at each other strangely, except for the heterosexual, white, rich-type males that were in the front because most of us figured they would be there, we went inside. (even i feel guilty saying that now, but its the system)
5) we sat in the chairs the way we had been outside, so i was in the back.
6) then we talked about what we learned.

1. can't judge a book by its cover.
2. its nobody's fault because we are all victims of internalized stuff and institutions within the system.
3. it was sociology, but it was interesting to see it played out in the group of people that i will be working with this year.
   

it was weird because i felt like the people in the front were trying to justify why they were there instead of acknowleding that they had lead more privileged lives than the rest of us. yes, i consider myself privileged, i have a super loving family, i have never worried about if i was going to eat or not, or if i wasn't going to have a home or anything like that. my parents took an interest in my education, etc, but there were other factors that placed me in the back, such as being brown, being an immigrant, english not being my first language (although now it kind of is), etc. i mean i definitely didn't ever get everything i wanted when i was growing up, but i think that was ok. i didn't want the people in the front (mostly guys) to justify their position in the room, i wanted them to recognize WHY they were up there. it was a long night for most of us. and people of course got angry, but the biggest rule at BTR was agree to disagree.

agree to disagree - means that you can respectfully disagree to anything but don't get an attitude.

then after the workshop we had free time, which basically meant showering in the dark and going to bed so that we could wake up at 6:30am for breakfast and PT.

PT - physical training. not hard, but we do PT to demonstrate spirit, discipline, purpose and pride. in a big location for all 140 of us.

will update on the other days soon.

pre-retreat

so our first week of BTA (basic training academy) is over and we are about to go on BTR (basic training retreat) for the next four days. i think i am just going to post the conversation i had with helen because it kind of sums up what BTA has been like and then when i get back post about the awesome RETREAT!!! and the highlights of last week and training. just to say that i have met a lot of people from literally all walks of life and i am truly glad that i am here. i also have a bed, so do not worry (if you, the reader were worried) because i am no longer sleeping on the floor. although this morning i discovered that we are so close to the next house that i can hear their alarm when it goes off. so great. also now we have internet in my apartment (which is the top two floors of a house) so hopefully it will be easier and faster and more convenient to update regularly. i am missing WM a lot, mostly my 07 people, but even if i was at WM, none of them would be there because we are pretty much all over the world. but i mean, we all made our own choices and i hope that everyone is happy where they are. i am happy here most of the time.


9:44 AM Helen: how's the job?
9:46 AM me: so cool
haha yeah
for sure
its weird
because its like
in order to foster idealism we have to create a culture where idealism can thrive
and thats what we've done all week
Helen: for example
?
9:49 AM me: for example
these things called power tools
which is basically to facilitate interaction between corps members
like stand & declare
every time you address a group
to show respect for the group and yourself
you stand up say your name and what team you are serving on
and then say your statement
Helen: that's a good idea!
me: regardless of the fact that most of us have vague ideas of our names
yeah
or
9:50 AM daily briefings
its part of the idea that your corps should alwasy be informed
so in the morning we get a newsletter
and we read it all together
and every section has like
a little thing
so you have the date
you say, good MORNING CITY YEAR BOSTON. today is september 6, 2007 and you lived to serve another day
9:51 AM and then the corps responds, and thats a beautiful thing.
Helen: that is amazing!
me: and every one is reading along on their own newsletter
and PT
like, its not really intense physical training
but it is a great like out in the city type thing
Helen: what a sweet idea though
me: in most sites its in a historical location or a central location in the city
9:52 AM so TONS of people walk by because we do it right as people are going to work
like 140 young people
doing jumping jacks in sync
its ridiculous
and we have chants
like
city year boston ARE YOU READY for some powerful lunges?
and we say
boston's always ready
and then!
the leader says
city year boston what time is it?
9:53 AM and we say: its time for us to represent (and then we start stepping.. like really) with spirit (beat beat) discipline, (beat beat), purpose, (beat beat) and pride (beat) yeah, pride.
Helen: hahahaha! i am picturing this and loving it so much! and i feel like you would be really good at it and i wuld like to represent with you
me: hahaha
if we have a video i will send you one
its pretty crazy
Helen: goood!!!!!!


here are my housemates...and public transportation. yeah. its love.

internet & furniture

so one of my neighbors is apparently donating internet to the neighborhood. and by that i mean that he/she doesn't lock up his/her wireless so we can use it sometimes when the signal comes in, but only on martin's macbook.

so far, we have picked up more furniture in the street, a camping chair and some assorted kitchen supplies. one of our neighbors, a few blocks away, sold bradley a really sweet twin bed frame, mattress & boxspring with a trundle bed for $50 and then gave allegra a free table. so i think everyone right now has a mattress except for me. i really really want one, but it is so hard to get anything in this town without a car and lots of money. well, i would've paid 50 but the boys were working for each other and so i didnt even know bradley was getting a bed until the man called us back today.

my spanish on the other hand, is one of the most useful things. we got a deal on a sweet table the other day at a yard sale and allegra got a free frame for her mirror from the lady... spanish. holla. sometimes though, we walk down the street and i can't understand because i think the people are from the DR and that spanish is fast. faster than a tongue moving your mouth for regular spanish.

tomorrow is our first day of work, and i have to admit... i am kind of nervous. really nervous. i don't know what to expect, even though i've been living with these people, i dont know what the rest of the corps is like. although, i heard last year that with such a big corps you don't even really get to know everyone because all of the work you do is team based. i guess tomorrow is my first adventure in finding that out.

furniture

so in order to acquire a mattress and various other furniture things for our new abode, we just walked down the street and went looking for the trash. the mattress (full-sized, mind you) we rolled home for about 12 or 15 blocks on a skateboard. we also found a mirror, a floor mat, various pots and pans, a sewing machine and also we went back and picked up a variety of small tables when we got a car in our hands. the mattress is martin's (one of my roommates) and we made him disinfect it and leave it out in the sun all day before we even let him bring it into our house because of things like BED BUGS.

oh yeah and i am currently mooching at java jo's and my raspberry tea is running out. i will write something big and post later i suppose.