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HARVESTING HOPES
THE FIRST POST...
Alright, so it is time to get this blog up and running... For those of you that dont know, I have recently moved to McDowell County in southern West Virginia to take a teaching job at Iaeger High School, although this is actually the last year for Iaeger as a school, and then it consolidates with the neighboring school called Big Creek, and will be known as Riverview High School. But anyway, I decided that it would be a good idea to have a blog to be able to update everyone about my experience at once instead of having to tell everyone about it individually, and then i would ineviteably forget people anyway. The name comes compliments of Jennifer my sister who knew I wanted to document my experience and that I was hoping to make it like a reverse freedom writers for a rural area, so she said call it harvesting hopes, and thats what it will be called! Now to the beginning, im going to provide some background here, so if you already know this, go ahead and skip over it...
The experiment of Harvesting Hopes actually began during my student teaching experience at West Greene High School near Waynesburg because it was during that time that I realized more than ever, and this will come to no suprise to most of you, that I was destined to be in a rural area... It was at West Greene that I really saw the potential that was to become my plan for harvesting hopes... It was an area full of people who grew up in rural surroundings, members of FFA, and an area mainly supported by the coal mines... It was an area that many more upscale areas had left for nothing... It was an area where the people were incredibly good people, incredibly hard working, incredibly respectful, in many cases people who deserved to succeed much more than people who are given all of the breaks. While teaching there, I actually felt appreciated, I actually felt like I had a purpose, and saw that with the right resources, those kids could accomplish great things.
From here, the story turns to another influential place in my life, which was Waynesburg College(now university R.I.P. college)... I dont know how much credit Waynesburg gets for it because I was already service minded coming in, but one thing they definitely did really well at was emphasizing service... There is a lot of other things they should be credited for, this is another one of those places where I was lucky to be surrounded by some of the best people you could ever imagine, and I wouldnt be at this point if it wasnt for my experiences there. They are also willing to help me try to get some of my kids into college scholarships through the bonner program or at least take them up there for overnight visits(thanks Dave Calvario for that one!) Bottom line, Waynesburg definitely plays a role in this because of the experience i had there and the committment to service they instilled.
Next up in the background is a story revolving around yet another important place, Pine springs Camp... During time there I had told people that I really wanted to work in a rural area and work with kids from way out in the country(although I wasnt picturing it being six hours away). This leads us to Alyssa, a counselor during my fourth summer working there, and a dallas cowboys fan(i guess we all make mistakes!). All football season we had gone back and forth with eachother about whose football team was better(i rest my case)... Then during the worst day in recent history, which to be exact was the day that the penguins were blown out 5-0 in game five of the 2009 stanley cup finals(happy ending though wasnt it?), Alyssa decided to pick up our friendly rivalry and ask me about the Penguins... i didnt respond right away, not because i was upset or angry with her... believe me i was certainly angry and upset at the world in general at that point, but not necessarily at her as an individual... but either way, Alyssa got worried that I was upset and changed the subject to my teaching job search. she asked if I was still looking to work with rural kids, and I said i think so and she gave me the e-mail of Pastor Ken, a church pastor who is involved with operation West virginia, and he began to put me in touch with people in McDowell County. So as an individual i suppose alyssa wins the prize for being the one who told me about this place to begin with...
Another huge influence and help in this whole process goes to my family, who it would have been impossible to come down here without, and nearly impossible to come down with if that makes any sense... they were supportive in the whole process, from my dad driving twelve plus hours in one day to bring me down for my interview, to him, my mom, john, and jennifer helping me get moved in(Michael would have been here if he could have)... they also were extremely supportive through the whole process, and after all they are my family!
Lastly in the background story, I suppose you gotta give some credit to God... i mean it really is as much his story as it is mine, plus im pretty sure he would kill me(or be pretty upset) if i didnt give him credit... I dont think there is any other way i would have ended up down here to begin with than if God had some hand in it, and there is certainly no way i would survive here on my own if he wasnt involved... Two many random circumstances have lined up for this to be completely chance, and i suppose there is something im supposed to be here for and you can read all about what that purpose is on here as it unfolds... hopefully i can make a difference in this community and harvest some hopes...
*** there are so many other people in my life who were extremely supportive in all of this and who got me here whether it was the ed. department and some other faculty at waynesburg, the people i worked with and taught at west greene, the friends i made at waynesburg and pine springs, my extended family, "D" for showing me how to coach volleyball(and Justin too) when my girls win states ill let you guys have medals or something, ashley for taking over our jr. high soccer team all alone, and i dont want this to sound like a generic thank you blanket, but know that if i invited you to read this blog, you must have had some impact on my life and i truly do care about you... come visit me and you WILL make it into the blogby name!!!
more to come on the first week soon...
SORRY THIS SECOND POST TOOK SO LONG...
So it has been a long time since the first update. I know you all have been eagerly awaiting, or not so eagerly awaiting, the second post, so here it is. It has been almost exactly a month since I moved down here, so this will be kind of a big post. If you dont have time or just dont feel like reading the whole thing, it can be summarized in the following sentence: I am alive, nothing has killed me yet! But seriously, there is a lot to write about from the past month. I am OCD, so im going th try to do it chronologically, but there will probably be a lot of random asides and stories.
First off, i will fill you guys in on how my home situation is going. I am living in Welch, WV which is about a thirty minute drive from Iaeger where I am teaching. Welch is a small town area that has a similair feel to a Waynesburg without the college and without any young people if that makes sense? I am renting a house from a guy who lives and works in Washington DC but is from Welch. He has been very helpful in getting me situated, and has made the transition to living here a bit easier. It has certainly taken a long time to get fully settled in, especially because most of the things around here work much differently and at a much much more relaxed pace than I was accustomed to at home. For instance, the first week I was here they were supposed to come and install phone and internet on Tuesday, but could only tell me that it would be between 8:00AM and 4:00PM. They eventually did send a guy at around 1:00, and he was very helpful. I still havent managed to get cable set up, although i am not really home long enough to really even use it, so for now it works out fine(although now that it is football season, and especially come hockey season, I need people to keep me updated). Probably the most difficult thing to get set up was mail delivery to my house. It took about three weeks, first I had to set up a physical address for my house, then I had to take the physical address form to the post office to start delivery, but they are only open from 8 til 4 which was entirely during school hours. Luckily, I had a student for the first week of school(he has since switched to another class) whose dad worked for the post office, and he was super helpful in getting me set up with that. So i now do officially have mail delivery and if you feel the need to send me something, my address is 20 Hobart St. apartment #2 Welch WV 24801. I dont really spend much time around Welch, and when im here, I mostly am just between my house and church, although there is a movie theatre, several restaraunts, and a bowling alley and several parks that are pretty nice, i just havent really had anyone to go to those places with yet. My neighbors are pretty nice people, mostly older folks, but nice. The county judge lives across the street from me, and the rest of my neighbors are retired.
Now on to where I spend most of my time, Iaeger High School. The first day of school was August 26th, and we have been literally running 100 miles an hour since that day. The school is fairly small, about 100 kids per graduating class, and the building itself is very small, less than 30 class rooms. The school complex consists of the football field, gymnasium, main school building, and two portable trailers that also hold classes. I was lucky enough to get a room in the older of the two portables in classroom #2. It has worked out ok so far, it is weird being about 50 yards from the school itself, but has not been a major problem. It will be interesting to see how things work if there is a downpour during the school day(although it will probably cut down on kids asking to use the hall pass). My big portable also contains the band room, cafeteria, and three other classrooms. Another nice thing about it is my parking space is literally five feet from my classroom door. It is definitely very isolated, but I do have one teacher who is my next door neighbor, Ms. Burns, and she is very helpful. She is an English teacher who taught college for 20 years before coming down here. She likes to feed the stray animals that hang out near our building, so we have lots of pets to go with it! As for my actual classes, our schedule works on block scheduling, which means the day is split up into four 90 minute blocks and then all of the kids switch classes halfway through the year. they have me planning for three completely different blocks, which has been EXTREMELY difficult, especially having to start from scratch with limited resources, but with the shortage of staff, you dont have much choice but to just go with what they tell you. My first job each morning is to sit in the gym with all of the students who get to school early in the day before the first class, which is about as easy of a classroom duty as you could have! From there, the first block is my planning period, which is nice because it gives me the first hour and a half to wake up, plus i dont have to do morning attendance or anything like that. My second block is 20th/21st century history, which is the one i feel best prepared for becuas eit is U.S. history and some of the same things I taught during student teaching. It is the required 11th grade history, which is a good thing because it means the students are more motivated to complete assignments because they need to pass it. there is about 30 students in there, which is pretty crowded, but they are mostly good kids, and we have no major problems. About half of them leave fifteen minutes early to eat lunch before vo tech, but the last fifteen minutes is cool because it give sme a chance to just talk to the students and get to know the ones that are not leaving. From this class, we go to lunch, which I eat with some of the other guy teachers, although I am by far the youngest one, but they are cool guys to eat with and very friendly. after lunch is psychology, which started as a very small class of 8 kids, which was a good thing, because we only have 12 books right now. However, over the first nine days of school(yes kids switched classes nine days into the year) they added 16 more kids, so that i now have a psychology class of 24(with 12 books). They are mostly good kids as well, although there is more kids who are unmotivated to do anything, but that is partly because they threw a bunch of random kids in there that didnt necessarily want to be in psych. It is also a new thing for me to teach, but we are learning on the fly, and hopefully by December i will be an expert in psychology! Finally, we end the day with Travel West Virginia. thats right they gave the state tourism class to the kid from Pittsburgh. It is also interesting because it is entirely seniors, and a lot of them are cheerleaders(who are actually pretty motivated) and football players(who are actually not very motivated, but resourceful as they get the cheerleaders to carry them through the class. Right now we are designing a web site for the state, which you can see at travelwestvirginia.wetpaint.com. It is long work and im not exactly sure how things will work out with it, but we are getting there. This is the one class that I wish i would have had more time to prepare for and it could be a really great class, but we are kind of being forced to just make it up on the fly. If I teach it again, I have a better idea of how it would work, but for now we do the best we can. There is no major problems in the classes, just a lot of talking and unmotivated students, but those are things you will have anywhere. It has been a challenge to get organized, especially because I only got a computer in my room in the middle of last week, and there is just a severe lack of resources and lots of organizational issues. The school has one main computer lab with 28 or so working computers, and a mobile lab with 14, and I recently found out that ive been approved to get a laptop and a projector in my room, which is a good thing! Overall, class is going ok, ery hectic and surviving day to day, but it will get better(at least i sure hope so), but it is not bad. I have tried to really get involved in the community, and I think it has helped with my interactions with the students. I have been to several of their football games(they are 2-0 when i go and 0-1 when im not there), and I joined a bunch of students and people from the community for pick up basketball last wednesday(at which I was just about the weakest player, but they said I did good, so that counts right?). Next week is homecoming, which will be crazy, especially because it will be the last one, but it will be a fun time to experience. If you want to come down, I promise it will be ridiculous!
Now we will move on to the other part of my life, which is coaching. I have actually been at this part of it since basically the day after I moved in to my house. I went out to the school the first Monday i was here, and the a lot of the volleyball team happened to be there, so we had an impromptu practice and set up practices for the rest of that week. Pretty much from day one i realized two things. 1.) I had a dedicated group of great girls and parents too for that matter, who were going to be willing to work hard and do just about anything I asked them and 2.) We had an extremely long way to go in order to put together a team, but the potential was there. It was also apparent early on that there program had suffered from an extreme lack of continuity and organization/structure, but that the group I had was ready to embrace the structure that I have been trying to bring to them. we started off slowly, especially because the first couple of days we only had two volleyballs to work with(the rest had mysteriously dissapeared). It was apparent that many of the girls had no prior knowledge of volleyball, and the ones that did had been learning the game the wrong way and would need to relearn. The first two weeks was spent just trying to get basic things up and running, trying to form a parent booster group to work with the fundraisers, concessions, ticket slaes, buying uniforms, etc. that comes with any club or sport and trying to teach the girls the basic fundamentals of the game of volleyball as well as bringing them some much needed fitness training. To the girls extreme credit, they took the two weeks and worked harder than they ever had in volleyball and made huge improvements. They began to see what we could be capable of, and I now have twenty girls of varying abilities who have bought in to my idea of their team. We split into a varsity and JV after those two weeks, and i almost had an assistant coach to help work with the JV but the school board did not approve the need for an assistant, so it is just me. We also have to split the gym with the cheerleaders most days, so it makes practices interesting, but we make it work. There are several things that come with coaching in Iaeger that I didnt necessarily expect, but that have worked out well. When you coach a sport, whichever one it is, you gain a level of respect throughout the community/school. You also serve as your own AD, and have to schedule all matches, get officials, organize transportation(we car pool because buses are too expensive), fill out all of the paperwork, etc. They also had meet the Cubs night the first week of school where they introduced all of the fall sports(football, cheerleading, and volleyball) as well as the band. Kind of like a glorified after school pep rally that was a pretty big turnout. This was not my favorite idea, especially because we were missing out on practice time, but it was great for the kids to get recognized. This night was also when I realized how much my team appreciated me, as I left my name off of the list to be announced, and two girls ran across the field to the press box to ensure that they knew to announce me as coach, and the team told me that they would not be the team they are without me. They also make it a point to visit me during class, track me down at football games, and try to play matchmakers. Another non volleyball thing, but an important thing to the team, will be homecoming and the homecming parade, which we will be having a float for. As for actual volleyball, we have had two matches. The first one was about 1 hr 30 min away from the school, and we were expecting it to be JV and Varsity, but to our suprise got there and found out that it was a tri-match with two other schools that was set to be varsity only, and we were playing first in about 15 minutes after we got there. this was not the best suprise to start off with, and much of our team was very flustered, as was I. To add to that, most of the girls were extremely nervous, and we found ourselves down 10-1 in our first game. Once we got settled in, we did much better, but still ended up losing both matches that night. We had our second match this past Thursday, a tri-match that we actually knew was a tri-match going in, imagine that! We won the match against the first school Matewan 2 games to 1, so I guess that goes down as my first victory as a varsity coach? We had a bit of a scare between matches, as one of our players was hit in the head by an errant warm up serve and was knowcked unconscious(she is ok, just a minor concussion), however, the team pulled together well during the second match. we ended up losing in three close games(23-25, 25-21, 23-25) but it was the closest and most competitive volleyball either of the two teams had ever seen, and that anyone in the stands had seen for that matter, so it was still very exciting. We play that same team three more times this season, so it should be a good rivalry.
So there you have it. Things are moving along ok in my harvesting hopes experiment, I am beginning to meet people and make some connections/friends in the community and Hopefully it will not be so long between updates from here out as i have more time to post. Sorry this is so long, i tried to color code the sections to break it up, but i dont know if it helped. Let me know what you think and post comments at the bottom if you want!
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Posted by got0465 on 2009-08-21 21:53:12 | Rating: | Views: 378
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