Posts

Care week

 Through my journey with mental health, there have been many times that I needed care only to experience both the caring and uncaring side of systems. I had talked briefly about experiences with mental health while in school and how certain educators supported me. What I didn't mention (mostly for the sake of time) was that before I went to Spain, I was unable to finish out my junior year in school and was attending an outpatient program instead. I was able to focus on getting the help I needed because I was supported by my administrators. They checked in with me regularly, allowed me to come in after school to take exams and ensured that I wouldn't fall behind.  However, only a few years prior I had a very different experience with my middle school administration. I had also touched upon this in my Educational Journey. I was afraid to go to school, my grades were slipping and I had no motivation to be there. All the administration had to say was that they would have people st...
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Intersectionality

 " Privilege is a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor.  There is racial privilege, gender (and identity) privilege, heterosexual privilege, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, educational privilege, religious privilege and the list goes on and on. At some point, you have to surrender to the kinds of privilege you hold because everyone has something someone else doesn’t."  This quote from Roxanne Gay is the one that I will carry with me. She summed up intersectionality of  privilege beautifully. There are so many different layers in which we have privilege but also where it lacks. She talks about how she is a woman and person of color but she also grew up in the middle class and didn't have to worry about her education being paid for. As a white woman, I understand that I would have more privilege than she would but I don't have as much as my white male counterparts. As much as we want to have equity in most spaces, we firs...
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Studying young people

 The first thing that stuck out to me from the "Willful" reading was that at the end it talks about how Sean's expressions were his way of wanting socialization and expressing underlying feelings. I try to use the teaching of not punishing children for their outbursts everyday with my students. Many of them have impulses to talk out during class or to not do work. With teenagers they have so many emotions going on at once that they don't always know how to productively express them. Punishing them for expressing emotions the only way they know how in the moment could cause them to feel like they can't express their emotions as they get older. With the second reading, it discusses the disproportionate labeling of BIPOC children as intellectually disabled or emotionally disturbed compared to their white counterparts. While there is some intersectionality between race and disability, I don't believe the two are exclusive. The assumption that they are come from wh...
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Defining Youth

 As a white woman, I don't know what my BIPOC counterparts experience in their formative years or even their current day to day life because of the color of their skin. I do however, know what to an extent what they might be experiencing because of their gender. But even that is not completely comparable. In the video, the narrator made many valid points that young girls of color are held to a different standard than young white girls. They have the characterizations of being less innocent just because they are black. Teachers won't put as much effort into their Black students to help them succeed as they will for their white students which causes the dropout rate among the black community to be higher than the white community. I've had people tell me that the students I work with are not worth it because they're not going to graduate or succeed. I refuse to believe that is true of any student anywhere. When enough adults tell a child that they are not enough or not wor...
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K/L/M of YDEV

 Having been in the YDEV community for some time, I was already aware that community-based work has come a very long way. I still get the questions "what's that?" or "what kind of jobs can you get with that?" when I tell family members that I decided to get my degree in Youth Development. I always tell them that I can do whatever I want. When thinking about the kids I have worked with in various spaces over the years, I always wonder if I made an impact on any of them or if they talk about me the way I talk about my favorite teachers. Even now, reading the second text resonates more with me since I'm working with the youth that Rhode Islanders view as "disposable" or "hopeless" and it makes me so upset when they say that. It used to just bother me before but now, it makes me physically angry because these kids are so smart. They have goals and interests just like everyone else but because they are constantly dismissed, it's chipping a...
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Pandemic tribulations

 An important moment for me during the pandemic was when I lost my job due to everything closing down. I was a server at the time so when they banned in person dinning, I was SOL. I had just purchased a new laptop for school and had various bills I needed to pay plus still attending school. It was then that I had become so anxious about how I was going to keep up on everything that it would make me nauseous. Then it was announced that stimulus dollars would be given with the unemployment dollars. I started to feel better about paying my bills. I was able to have some of it forgiven which lifted the weight as well. Once I was able to take a breather, I had the realization that if I had actually lost my job I would be screwed. I don’t know what I would do if I had been fired instead of effected by a pandemic. Since then I have shifted my saving goals as well as budgeting. Although we can’t take money with us when we die, we still need it for everything while we’re living. 
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