Putting Idealism To Work

wow. so i meant to update this every week or so but i've been SO busy! since my last update, ALOT has happened. To recap, we went on a 3 day retreat in Santa Cruz where we found out what schools we'd be serving in for our year of service and were given the opportunity to really bond with our new teams. For the next 10 months, I will be proudly serving at Cesar Chavez elementary school in the Alum Rock school district and I'm sooo excited because everyone on my team is so awesome. After countless hours of team building and workshops, we were ready to take on the huge task of summer school! We're the only site nationwide that ran a week long summer school program and personally I think we did a PHENOMENAL job. The kids always seemed excited to come back the next day and were really pumped to start school. Needless to say, waking up at 5am every morning and getting home close to 7pm was totally worth it.


Fast-forwarding two months, it seems like we have been at these schools for years! I know so many of the children now and my favorite part of the day is when I get huge hugs from my kids and tons of "Hi Miss Jhulie!'s. That's what makes waking up so early and working 60 hour weeks worth it. It's been challenging and it will continue to be so but I'm determined to get my children to the level they need to be at. You never know how bad it is until you're put in the situation of teaching a 5th grader who reads at a first grade level. It exists and it makes me angry. But I'm grateful that I had people who cared about my education and gave their all to help me be who I am today. My parents are the reason I will be able to help the kids who have already been given up on. The expectations I've set for myself are high and I hope that I am able to make a difference in their lives.

On a lighter note--Friday was our Opening Day! Across the nation in 20 cities, 1750 other people pledged their year of service to helping ameliorate our failing education system. Below are some pictures from the event.





To end my post, I want to leave you with my favorite quote in City Year so far. Our quotes are called PITW's which stand for Putting Idealism To Work.

PITW #79: It's never what we say, It's always what we do.

If you care about something that needs to be changed, DO something about it.

Love and miss you all<3

Week 1 Day 2

"A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead

Hello again :) This isn't much of an update but rather I thought I'd share with you a video that I think fully grasps what it means to be a corps member and give you more of a visual and understanding of what my service year entails. It's only 2 minutes long! Enjoy!


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sZCdlc9BfQ

xoxo, Jhulianna

Week 1 Day 1

Hi everyone! This is where I'll be keeping those who are interested, updated on my life for the next year or so. For the people who have no idea what I'm doing out in California, I am serving as a first year corps member for the nonprofit organization, City Year in San Jose/Silicon Valley. In a nutshell, I will be mentoring and tutoring children in an East San Jose school as well as participating in service days around the community once a month.

We had our first service day today at Lake Cunningham Park (see picture of picnic area at the top). For the first couple of hours, we broke up into smaller "crazy teams" of about 6-7 other corps members; we'll be working with our crazy teams for the next 3 weeks as we complete our basic training academy before school starts. After lunch, we participated in beautification projects of the park, in which my team's task was to clean up trash by a creek and then go to an area and do some mulching. Some of the items we found thrown in the woods were a bit ridiculous (old gym shorts, a hamster cage, a knee pad..just to name a few). So the next time you're tempted to toss your empty water bottle or your gum wrappers on the ground because you're too lazy to walk to the nearest garbage can, remember that people just like your beloved Jhulianna are the ones picking it up. Also, if you have no idea what mulching is then click on this.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulch. Trust me, it's as fun as it looks.

For the rest of this week, we'll be sitting in really long meetings and workshops discussing everything there is to know about working/teaching/mentoring in schools. Should be interesting!

Until next time (and I promise to be good about updating this)!

Love and miss you all! Xoxo