Student Presence

Day 3 SXSW! I went back to the hotel a bit early today because officially got to that point where I was starting to have a cognitive load overdrive and needed a break. So much great content happening in such a short amount of time it really is fantastic!

Something that I found striking today, which I often find myself thinking about at every conference I attend, is the extreme lack of young learners present. Edu conferences tend to have extreme discounts for students to attend these events, but hardly any organizations / schools seem to take advantage of these policies by trying to get these stakeholders To attend. I know these conferences may be designed for teachers, admin, etc. but everyone here will spend all day talking about how, ”we must include student voice,” yet where is the action where it matters? Where are the students?!?!

There are a few other young learners present other than me and my sister, however, even these learners seem to just be around for their one session they’re presenting at and then disappear. To be fair, perhaps they could have just been at sessions I wasn’t at, or my sister, but I haven’t seen anyone yet in any session or the hall which makes this feel unlikely.

Furthermore, within the 2 sessions where I have seen students involved, the students were primarily asked to talk about their past experiences. Then, as is consistent with other conferences I’ve been to, the last question is something to the extent of, ”If you had a magic wand” or ”If you could trade places with x” then ”what would you change about school?”

Even in the keynote presentation for today, students were involved, which is a great first step that I don’t want to undermine, and some great things were said during the conversation from learners of all ages. I quoted many in my Tweets today. However, that said, these students were primarily brought in to talk about their experience learning during COVID… The reason this bothered me is because COVID shut school down 2 years ago; if we are only just now asking students about their experience on something that was such a huge radical issue, then we are too late.

Additionally, beyond wishing that more young learners were involved in education conferences, I wish the students that were involved were asked more questions about their current observations and more about their thoughts on the future. Students have way more thoughts and ideas than just those relevant to their past experiences in education. I know educators know this because it gets talked about in every single session in almost every single conversation.

Now the question is who will start taking the next steps to not just include students in conversations within the safety of their own learning environments but on a larger scale, bringing young learners beyond their own learning environments into the conversations of the nation’s education system?

Trailblazers: Issue 3!

It’s finally here! Issue 3 of Trailblazers, our student-driven e-magazine about the Education Transformation Movement, is available for viewing now! Hope you enjoy these remarkable articles written by spotlight learners from around the country including one global perspective. Congrats to all involved with the process of creating this latest issue!!!

View Issue 3 

Spotlight Learners:

Sophie Haugen – SMforSM: An Educational Partnership 

Bridges by Empathy and Friendship

Lucy Conover – Insπiration

Hannah Bertram – What Learner-Centered Education Did For Me

Innovation Diploma Update – SPARK: A Playground for Creative Thinkers

Articulating Myself

I know myself well, and I believe my blog is evidence that I can also talk about myself comfortably. This is a skill I’ve come to greatly value and highly attribute to my decision to start a blog three and a half years ago.

Over the past semester thus far I’ve been struggling to determine my major. Struggling, because I have a good grasp of what I’m looking for and just can’t quite find the best fit at my school. To be honest I’ve considered more than once if I should be switching schools.

Don’t get me wrong, Georgia Tech is a great school, but I’ve always known it’s not the best fit for me personally. I’ll be the first to admit GT was never at the top of my list college wise, but it was still the right choice in the end. How can the right choice not be the best fit?- it’s complicated. There are a lot of factors that play into that decision. The point is, I’m not going to be transferring schools.

This begs the question of, what next?

Personally, I’ve had to be very proactive. I’ve been talking to as many people as possible and doing research on my own to try to figure out how to make do.

That may seem pessimistic and perhaps sad to use the term “make do,” but I don’t see it that way because I’ve realized that’s just the nature of higher education. Not everyone ends up at the perfect school for them and I don’t think we should pretend this is the case. What I’ve also realized is that the real key to happy success, (not just success in terms of making it out with some major, but actually being happy while you’re working towards graduation) is to know yourself well enough to make what you want exists even in an environment where it might not noticeably exist yet.

Now, this realization did make me sad.

From personal experience, I know that not every kid graduates high school with a good sense of their self. Yet it’s what I think should be a number one priority of primary education.

We spend so much time trying to learn about the world around us and where it came from and where it’s going, but I don’t believe we spend enough time being introspective. There are educators that have realized this, and there are some techniques that try to get implemented into the classroom to focus students on being introspective. However, I feel like the go-to attempt at solving this problem is telling students, “Write a reflection on your recent assignment.”

There are a couple of reasons I don’t think this is a sufficient way to try and help learners better know themselves.

First of all, not every student expresses themselves best in a written fashion; if this is the case, writing won’t help all students equally.

Furthermore, knowing yourself takes looking at the big picture, not just reflecting on how you worked on one specific assignment.

It’s really about asking the right questions that force learners to think deeper about themselves, then let them figure out how they want to express it in a way that other people can understand. (Being able to articulte to others about who you are is the real key to finding happy success.)

In high school, I wish I would’ve spent more specific facilitated time being questioned about what I really enjoy doing with my life in terms of personal things, activities, and work. What type of environment do I like to be in? How do I work best? What role do I often play on a team, and why? What career areas might interest me in the future based on what I’m doing now? What are different major options I might not know of but might interest me?

Some kids get lucky. They take a CS course in high school and fall in love and know that’s what they want to do in the future. But what if they teach themselves CS and don’t realize what they thought was a hobby could turn into a career? What if they could’ve been pushed to get to that point even earlier and starting doing work designing apps as a high schooler and never realized that was a possibility at their age? What if you have a student who doesn’t happen to fall in love just after taking a class and is very undecided about their future? -You don’t all of a sudden gain clarity without talking to people, and I see no reason why these conversations can’t happen during primary education. It’s never too early to think about what you enjoy and value in your life and how those elements can help give you ideas about future options.

You don’t need to leave high school knowing your career plan. That’s unrealistic and way too much to ask of 18-year-olds. However, I think it is a reasonable goal to say that by the end of high school, learners should know themselves well enough to know what specific options are out there that they want to explore. Beyond just getting to college, k-12 education should graduate students that have an idea of what they want to do when they get there- that takes advising that I believe is lacking for most students and it doesn’t magically appear in college.

How might we graduate high schoolers who have a strong sense of self?

reMoVe10

After months of data collecting and interviewing, the reMoVe10 team finally had our big presentation to our City of Sandy Springs clients, representatives from Georgia Clean Commute, and a handful of MVPS admin!!

Background

Spark:

No one likes sitting in traffic. It waste time, energy, and money and it is only getting worse each year. Early September of 2016 representatives from the City of Sandy Spring
contacted the Innovation Diploma to partner with us as consultants in a Design Brief in order to achieve the city goal to decrease traffic in the city by 10%.

Goal:

Lead conversations and experiments at Mount Vernon Presbyterian School to decrease traffic in the school community by 10%. Then using MVPS as a small area case study group, develop traffic recommendations for schools in the Sandy Springs area and the city as a whole.

Partners:

• City of Sandy Springs council (Client)
• Mount Vernon Presbyterian School
• Georgia Commute Options

Data Collection

The first phase of our work was to better understand our community by learning how and where from people commute to school. In order to do this, we compiled data from our school directory, manually counted cars coming into the school early in the morning, and observed traffic patterns during our morning and afternoon carpool. 

After working with our school’s registrar, we were able to take information we had gathered and develop this visual of where our families come from.

 

We also created this info-graphic which we sent out to the MVPS community to gain support and focus group partners for the movement. We learned that we currently have 662 cars coming into MVPS every morning. Based on estimates for the growth of our school, we should have around 770 cars by the year 2020 when our new high school building is finished being built. With this projected growth rate, it’s imperative that we act now to decrease traffic. If we successfully cut traffic down by 10% now, then we will be decreasing the number of future cars by 180 cars, decreasing pollution by 2,730 lbs of CO2, and saving 5,000 minutes of time commuting as a community (based on the average distances families currently travel from in order to get to MVPS).

Focus Group Insights

After collecting numerical data, the reMoVe10 team wanted to reach out to members of the MVPS community to better understand the MVPS carpool process from the primary users. After sending out our info-graphic, we gathered two parent/faculty focus groups to speak to where we discovered that the Lower School carpool line was more congested than the Upper School since less lower school students stay after school for sports and clubs. We then met with two fourth grade groups and two kindergarden groups in order to hear from the students about how they get to their cars in the afternoon.

Here were some of our take aways:

Next Steps:

 

Removing traffic in an area doesn’t take a revolutionary idea. There are some rather simple things that we can do as a community to decrease traffic. The key is communication and everyone getting passionate and involved in the movement.

The reMoVe10 team is partnering with Georgia Commute Options, a government funded program that promotes taking cleaner routes to school and work by providing incentives and help with finding carpool partners. Our team plans to give presentations to parent and student drivers in the upcoming weeks to get them excited and signed up with the free Georgia Commute Options app that gives members access to these benefits. We then will work with the organization to see how traffic is effected based on the number of people with the app associated with the Mount Vernon community.

The team will also explore more ways to promote alternative travel options in order to decrease the number of cars on the road. We already have a hashtag (#reMoVe10) and several blog posts on our Innovation Diploma website, and will do a deeper dive into other forms of effective mass communication techniques.

Reflection

The reMoVe10 team has come a long way in the past few months (this link goes to my blog posts along the journey). As a team we had various struggles with communication along the way; people would be absent and not notify anyone as to why, people would wonder out of the work space without a reason, people would not answer texts, etc. While this was very frustrating in the moment, we grew a lot with being able to confront these situations. We had many “come to Jesus moments” where we would talk about these problems and establish a new plan, and by the end of the semester everyone was doing a much better job at communicating with only minor hiccups.

It’s really hard to call a fellow teammate out, but when doing real world work, it is a necessary uncomfortably moment. If problems aren’t addressed, then they will keep happening, and that creates an unhealthy work environment. I think one of the places I grew most as a leader on this team was by being able to facilitate these necessary conversations that no one really wanted to have.

Even in the last week leading up to our big presentation we were struggling to bring things together. We realized that there is a lot of empathy work that we could have done earlier in the process. Our focus group meetings happened back to back only a few weeks before our final deadline, and it was great that they happened, but we realized the insights we identified would have been valuable at an earlier point in time. Furthermore, there are more people that we would have liked to talk to and we should have observed carpool more often, and now we’re having to go back and make up for what we really should have done earlier in the process. The jump from researching to empathizing is often the hardest hurdle to get over in my opinion, and our team truly experienced this. It was most evident in our practice pitch we gave two days before the big presentation, that we had some gaps in our project. However, we were able to pull it all together in the final hours and shifted the focus of our presentation to highlight the great work we had done. In every project it’s easy to later identify things you wish you would have done, but that shouldn’t discredit what you did do, and I was really proud of the quality of the presentation we gave in the end. Our clients even said, “This is better that some of the presentations we hear from adults that we pay to do this kind of work!”

A big part of the purpose of our presentation was to just get the right people in the room to make connections between all of the partners we’ve been working with. We achieved this goal better than we could have planned for; there were people still talking about the possibilities our work has brought up for nearly an hour after we thanked people for coming and said we were finished with their time. These conversations made me really excited with where this project could go in the upcoming months.

Our team had originally planned on disbanding after this presentation and not working 100% on this project (though we would do monthly check ins to keep up with the work). However, after the success and momentum the reMoVe10 movement gained after this presentation, we realized that we can’t stop now. The team is still in the process of figuring out who and how everyone will  be involved  next year, but I can guarantee the project will not die with the end of a semester.

 

Introducing Public Buggy; Jam

New year, new team, new venture.

The past two years in the Innovation Diploma I have been a part of a lot of projects driven by students observations that lead to ventures. For example the Co-Venture to re-design our iStudio space and last year’s ReSpIn team working on creating a recycling system in the middle school.

This year I’m moving into the world of Design Briefs.

In its inaugural year, iDiploma was incredibly successful in “consultivation” work (consult + innovation) where we invited members from the Mount Vernon community to bring a problem or opportunity to be workshopped in a 90 minute design thinking session. The partners we had for those sessions left with plausible and implementable solutions, and our learners became much more comfortable with their design thinking muscles. This year, we committed to incorporate even bigger and longer term projects via “Design Briefs” that anyone in the community can generate. Essentially, we’re creating a pool of potential projects that are not out of a textbook or dreamed up by a teacher, but instead projects that are generated out of need in the community.- MVIFI.org

Last year a team of ID cohort members worked on a Design Brief with Jeff Garrison, from S.J. Collins Enterprise, to design a pocket park in a new Whole Foods development which they named: Peachtree Station.  Last year’s Design Brief was so successful that this year, after a mini-internal Design Brief for practice, we have jumped right into 4 different Design Briefs scheduled to conclude around January at the latest. 

I am a member of team PB;J which stands for Public Buggy Jam team. We are working with the mayor of Sandy Springs to reduce traffic in the city by a hopeful 10%. To start, we are
using Mount Vernon Presbyterian School (MVPS) as a test group because it is a controlled environment. Our goal is to create a traffic reduction plan for MVPS that could serve as an example for other schools in the area as well. The hypothesis is that if enough schools work on reducing their traffic, we will impact the overall Sandy Springs traffic problems as well.

This team was assembled almost two weeks ago now, and so far we have made great progress crafting team norms, goals, timelines, and essential questions.

Currently we have been working on:

• planning out our time line and learning to use Trello as a task management tool
• researching what a professional Traffic Reduction Plan looks like and outlining what type of information we will need to provide
•  learning how to use Raspberry Pi to gain experimental data where we count the number of cars entering and leaving MVPS and time-stamping each car
• reaching out to MVPS admin to see what data already exists in terms of demographic questions we’ve had
• set up some norms:the first 15 minutes on Monday’s we will discuss goals and duties for the week 
  • the last 30 minutes on Monday we will spend with the entire ID cohort to make sure we keep everyone in the loop and have some community amongst the full team
  • PB;J team will write one blog post a week updating our progress and we will rotate who does the weekly blog (I was this week), and all of our posts will be archived on the Innovation Diploma website run by us high schoolers
  • and we decided to use the phrase “let’s tune in” if we notice that some of us are getting distracted and need to focus back in on our work

For only almost two weeks of school, I’m pretty happy with where we have come as a team and am excited to see where this venture goes.

 

Take Learning Outside Initiative

Background

Some of the faculty of Mount Vernon Presbyterian School came to the Innovation Diploma Pixar Cohort (members in their 2nd or 3rd year of the program) with the challenge of: How might we gain more traffic and awareness for the two outdoor classrooms on campus? We then had two weeks to go through the process of human centered problem solving to then pitch to our clients various high res prototypes that have potential for immediate implementation.

Key skills developed

• bias towards action
• craftsmanship of prototypes and presentation
• time management
• impromptu short interviewing
• communication

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Project Details

Phase One: Discovery and Empathy

With only two weeks to interview, research, ideate, prototype, and pitch ideas to our client, the Pixar team had to work quickly and efficiently. After some initial discussion, we divided our team into four sub committees right off the back:

1. Research Team: Why should we care about going outside?
2. Interview Team: What are the needs/concerns of MVPS community members?
3. Branding Team: How might we spread awareness about the spaces with well crafted branding strategies?
4. Cleaning Team: How might we make the spaces inviting enough for people to want to come into it once we spread the word about it’s existence?

After a week working on these sub committees the team re-grouped to share powerful insights:

Research

• A study performed by the University of Illinois found that students’ capacity to pay attention increased 13 percent if they had a green view outside their classroom window
• The Hollywood elementary study found as much, as the number of on-task students increased when the education moved outside.
• Studies have shown a 27% increase in science testing scores with plenty of time outside

(link to studies)

Interview

• 57% of the 51 students interviewed have only been in the outdoor classroom once
  since starting high school at MVPS
• Teachers are concerned with:
  • bugs/whether
  • logistics: taking attendance, time spent getting there and back to classroom, carrying stuff
  • a way to capture work: internet, white board, flip board, etc.
  • needing a table top
  • distractions: worried students will be distracted by the “newness” of outside
• Several teacher concerns were assumption based:
  • internet does in fact work outside
  • it takes about 2 minutes to get outside from the third floor if the class chooses to meet in their room rather than right outside
• More new teachers to the school were more curious, interested, and excited about using the outdoor space while a large amount of teachers at the school for even just a year were incline to say something to the extent of “I don’t think it will work for the type of class I teach”

Branding

• the word “classroom” has a certain connotation to a type of learning environment
• outside learning is a different kind of learning and therefore the space needs a new name

Cleaning

• cleaned up lot’s of trash and power washed the amphitheater seating
• discovered mold under the top layer of mulch and the wooden tables

Phase Two: Experiment and Produce

Based on these insights from week one, we spent week two creating new teams to develop a total of 7 prototypes, and a team of two worked to better craft our story and presentation for our pitch. The final prototypes were as followed:

1. camping chairs in the area for more comfortable seating
2. colorful signs to promote the space and creativity
3. words of wisdom promoting the use of the outdoors written on communal white boards and chalk boards around the high school
4. developed 2 different versions of digital signage to be showcased in the lobby of the building
5. 3 different versions of a water bottle with a sticker and note encouraging and reminding teachers to take advantage of the outdoor space
6. 2 large posters with quotes about the value of outdoor learning
7. 3 different versions of a portable lap desk with a white board surface to meet the need of not having enough surfaces for writing on

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RSzUNl4q0xmeITpOYiT-WM_Knd9wmjiAmnNae1u8T_E/pub?start=true&loop=true&delayms=5000

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Reflection and Client Feedback

Team

Being the first design brief of the year, and many member’s first ever design brief, and having such a short time frame, I believe the Pixar team did remarkably well. Our clients found the level of quantity and quality of our prototypes remarkable, and everyone was ready to further implement the ideas which shows a great level of empathy and understanding of the problem.

At the beginning of the process, most of us, myself included, were not found of the idea of going outside for class. We found it cumbersome and not exceptionally beneficial, and thus we were not thrilled about working on this challenge that went against our own beliefs. However, I was proud that our team was able to go through a mind-shift and focus on the fact that despite our feelings towards the challenge, our clients asked something of us and we needed to put our feelings aside in order to deliver.

Once aside our feelings, we still had a lack of communication in terms of what our goal was for the end of the two weeks. Some members were ready to start digging up mulch and give the area a complete upgrade because they thought that was what needed to happen in order to get more people in the space by the end of two weeks. This bias towards action was incredible, but it actually had to be dialed back some because our goal, as we clarified about two days before our deadline, was just to have small prototypes and concepts with a strong pitch for our client who could then implement the ideas if proven necessary. Once this clarifier meeting took place, the team made great strides in the last 48 hours before the deadline; working like a well oiled machine to be ready before our final pitch.

In the future, it would have been great if this clarifying meeting happened earlier on so that we could have been as productive as we were in the last two days for the entire timeline of the project; however, sometimes you don’t know you need a large group meet up until you get far enough a long for clear confusion. Based on the insight from this design brief, in our next team we plan to establish early on a clear understanding of the goal, the timeline, and tasks that need to be completed, and who is responsible for each task.

Even though for this challenge success didn’t include changing mulch, the amount of bias towards action was phenomenal during this challenge. This is a huge improvement from when we started in the Innovation Diploma and would spend weeks discussing ideas and never really take action and get working in the real dirt. We would not have been able to develop 7 well crafted prototypes if it hadn’t been for the level of agency and craftsmanship the team had as a whole.

Personal

I typically have a hard time with having a bias towards action because I’m a person that really likes to try and think through all of the details, but for this project I think I improved some. During part one of the challenge I was on the interview team, and while normally we would spend a lot of time carefully choosing interviewees and crafting emails to schedule a chance to talk, for this project we only had two weeks so we didn’t have time to go through the longer more detailed process. None of our interviews were scheduled and instead I literally walked around looking for students and teachers that weren’t in class and asking them to have impromptu 5-10 minute interviews with me. I even successfully convinced one teacher to have one of their classes outside during my free time so that I could observe the process of the class going to the space and then capturing how they interacted with it.

Another mindset I’ve been trying to embrace is the idea of making my work visible. For this project I worked on that by getting everyone to create visual representations of the key insights taken away from each teacher interview. Then I helped lead the team in synthesizing our insights to create one composite user (also with a visual representation) which we used to share out with the full group at the start of week two. To accompany our composite teacher user, we also had graphs of the student data collected which shows how we’ve grown with our ability to think visibly and also our ability to use technology to make our work at a higher quality level.

Going along with the theme of higher quality of work, I was incredibly impressed mine and my co-presenter’s ability to put together a high caliber presentation in mainly just two hours. The presentation had limited words on slides, edited pictures for ascetic purposes, the entire slide deck had an evident theme to help with the flow between slides, and the work was well synthesized to pair down all of the research, insights, and prototyping work we had done into one pitch around 15 minutes. Typically I wish that we would have rehearsed the pitch better and had the prototype speakers more confident and clear in their role, but I am impressed with the work we presented in a limited timeframe and our clients had no expressed negative comments on the presentation its self.

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Next Steps

The pitch was successful and prototypes are ready to be implemented, though technically our team has met our goal and deadline. Some prototypes remain in action such as the camping chairs and words of wisdom around the school, but some still need a little iterating and communicating with various people in order to have them implemented. Our team of 16 has completed this project, but a few may select to continue working with the client to finish the implementation process. I do not currently plan to continue with this team, though if that is where I am most needed in our start-up, then that is where I will continue to work.

Maker Culture

I’m a person who often gets involved in big time consuming projects that require lots of planning and organization. I love getting involved in these big projects, but at the same time it can feel like you’re walking on a treadmill: you just keep moving but you aren’t getting anywhere new.

This year I want to develop a better habit of taking action faster by focusing on more “small hacks.” Little short term projects that expose me to new skills while helping to change some small things that might otherwise get overlooked as not being a “big enough problem.” Making the life of even just one person a little bit better is still making an impact.

As part of my role as the Mount Vernon Institute For Innovation (MVIFI) Fellow, I work closely with the MVIFI Nucleus team and today I had a lunch meeting with them. This meeting was primarily about the Maker, Design, and Engineering programs we have been building at MVPS. A good chunk of the meeting was focused on how to get more people to take ownership and agency over the idea that they too can be a maker despite age, experiance, or teaching discipline.

This gave me an idea.

We have a maker’s space on both the lower and upper school campuses (Studio(i) and The Hive) where we have all sorts of tools such as 3D printers, laser cutters, vinyl cutters, CNC machines, and more that anyone can learn to use whenever they’d like to. Access to these tools is incredible because it means that we can develop high res prototypes in all sorts of mediums. Yet this is an opportunity that isn’t taken advantage of by nearly as many students and teachers as you would think– yet.

I personally do not even know how to use several of the tools that are available to me as part of the Mount Vernon community, and I want to change that. So I intend to start taking time every week to learn a new tool. While I’m learning, I hope to then make something related to different content areas which I can then give to various teachers in order to help encourage them to also use The Hive and to perhaps spread the maker mindset into their classrooms as well.

A maker, in my opinion, is someone who tinkers around with different materials and has a bias towards action in order to develop physical products. The maker culture therefore, is really centered around trying to make your thinking visible, which is something that is relevant and should be emphasized in all content areas. I want to live in a community of people who not only talk about big ideas, but a community of people who can build those ideas out and make them a reality.

In my experiance, schools want their students to be life long learners that feel empowered to take action. How do we teach the mindset of taking action? We teach students how to have a makers mindset. And this isn’t just the job of “Maker, Design, and Engineering teachers,” because in order for something to become a part of a communities culture, everyone must embody the mindset. It is everyone’s responsibility to embrace and spread the maker culture. 

 

Navigating the Bends

This is now my 3rd year as a cohort member of the Innovation Diploma and everyday I’m noticing new ways that we have grown overtime.  

Just today we were having a”Team Up” moment as we know are calling it, where we all gathered to debrief on where we are at and where we need to be at by tomorrow. We quickly identified that there was some miscommunication in terms of what everyone believed to be our definition of done for the current project we are working on. (The topic of the project is irrelevant for the purpose of this post, but in case you’re curious, we are working getting more traffic and awareness of our outdoor classrooms.) After coming to this realization, we talked things through as a team and were able to come to a consensus and decide on how to proceed.

I’m not really sure how to describe this process we went through, but after this Team Up took place, some of our observing faculty members commented on how fascinating it was to watch us. They said that it was really impressive to see a group of students lead this process of critical thinking about clarifying their task to help a client.

I found this funny because I hadn’t even thought about how it may seem impressive that we were able to have that conversation. To me those deep and messy conversations have become normal, but it wasn’t always this way. Thinking about it now, I realize we’ve grown into being able to have these conversations. With experiance being thrown into high stress, real world, situations with real stakes, we’ve learned how to better navigate the bends in the river.

It’s amazing how we change overtime without even noticing it sometimes, but then we look back and realize just how far we’ve come.

Sometimes We Need a Retreat

It’s been a long week for me, and one that was blog-less. A lot of things have been happening in life not just for me but for several of my friends as well which has created some extra stress, so I think it was good to retreat from blogging.

And it was great to have our senior retreat this past Sunday-Monday! We desperately needed a break from the world. My grade is honestly just wonderful; I couldn’t imagine a better group of peers to have gone through high school with. I love how everyone get’s along so well and we all feel comfortable with each other enough to start conversations with anyone. It makes team challenges way more fun and successful which I always think is a plus.

Though we did less activities than past retreats- swimming in a wave pool and paint ball this time- the trip as a whole was exceedingly meaningful to every senior at our school.

There is one particular activity we did as sophomores that we did again now as seniors that was heart wrenching both times, which we just call “circle time.” We pick our own small group of people to go out anywhere around the site, then we sit in a circle with one person in the middle. That person then goes around and every person on the outside says something they appreshiate about the inside person that just needs to be shared.

As sophomores, this activity meant the world to my friend group. The next 3 years of high school were strongly built on the moments we shared in that circle.

As seniors, some people were almost in tears before we even started; just the thought of the love that was about to be shared between family (we’ve long passed mere friendship) was enough to cry happy tears about for the past, and sad tears for a future not as connected to each other.

Everyone was a happy mess by the end of the night. And as we circled around the campfire, gazing at the stars and each other by the light of the fire, everyone left their own hopes and burdens aside, if only for a moment, to appreshiate the community of support we’ve built up over the past 4 years.

Sometimes you just need to have those deep, thoughtful, and appreciative conversations with others. We all just need a break sometimes. Time to let go of all of the stress if even just for a moment, and to appreshiate the supportive people around us that inspire us to be better humans each and everyday.

Our senior class bonded in ways unmeasurable by any school scale in these past few days. We were already close, but this retreat was well needed and invaluable. To think that we almost didn’t have this retreat (this year only seniors got a retreat) is inconceivable because I can’t describe just how much it meant to all of us. Everyone came home and started texting on the group chat we created for all of the seniors about how we loved the trip so much that we want to plan another for later in the year; even if not school related, most of the grade is interested in going camping, or having some sort of all senior retreat part 2.

Retreats are something everyone needs every now and then. I’m so glad that our grade got the opportunity to go on a retreat every year of high school because each one meant so much to me. They were some of the high lights of each year because they were moments where my friendships strengthened in ways I couldn’t imagine possible. I’m so grateful for our teachers who fought for us to keep this tradition alive at least for seniors; I already know it will be a notable moment for the entire year still ahead of us.

Blogging Helps with College

It’s amazing how much blogging has made my life better. Not only has it made me a better writer, increased my network, allowed me to track my learning, helped me clarify thoughts in my head, and gotten incredible writing opportunities, but it’s also helped a lot in the college process.

Most students have a hard time writing about themselves because creative non-fiction is a genre of writing that is focused on hardly at all in grade school. However, my blog is entirely about myself in someway or another because it’s all about my thoughts on the world, and my actions, and my life in general. My blog has helped me find my voice- not just the voice I take on when trying to write for school- but my authentic internal voice, which is supposedly what colleges want to see.

I’ve had the opposite problem of most students when writing my college essay because most students don’t know what to say or where to begin. Meanwhile, I’ve grown so use to writing a story every single day, that I felt like I had a million stories I could potentially use for my Common App essay. I had 3 different drafts done by Senior BootCamp, and had many more stories I could’ve told. I then narrowed it down to two, but thought they both represented me well. Finally, after some help from my college councilor tonight, I was able to pick one for my Common App essay which has to do primarily with when I first gave my MoVe Talk: Thinking Like a Designer.

I can only wait until I start working on college specific essays and other supplement questions, because with my blog it’s so easy to just scroll through the past few years and remember not only things that I’ve done, but also how I felt and what I was thinking about the day they happened. It’s kind of the best!