intersections

It is starting to sink in that I have a year ahead of me. Through the event of working my first work-week in a high school setting, it occurs to me that this is my first real job. My commitment is expected to be more than the months of summer. I have a year in this position, and with that, I’m feeling something between exhilaration and terror. The exhilaration is that I am working with Free Spirit Media. This educational setting is one of my dreams. In it, youth are not taught as objects into which information must be banked, but rather creative instruments that can be enabled by way of handing over cameras and basic skill sets. One of the jargons that I hear commonly in this community of media educators is “youth voice,” and it reminds me that the very basis of our teaching theory will be continually be based on the idea that education is meant to be empowering. I find myself in a role where my job is to hand over the camera and skills, and then guide youth to be both creative a...

One week ago today, myself and my three housemates moved into our new lives in Chicago. In the elapsed time, it’s actually become difficult to think of much that hasn’t happened. In the course of our busy week, we have moved into an apartment that started off a disaster (cabinets pulled, sinks on the floor, drywall-dust covering the floors), tapped into new social communities with past LVC volunteers, gotten to know our neighborhood, started our new jobs, picked up our local organic vegetables CSA share (yum), attended a movie-at-the-park, biked all over the city, I saw my brother Blake, and also saw my old housemate Jacob Swenson, went back to work, realized that I’ll actually be the one teaching tomorrow, and lastly, I learned how to bake bread (it’s rising right now). Basically I think they say, “he hit the ground running” for occasions like this. In this current moment, school is probably the biggest deal to me. During the first two days in the school, I’ve more or less laid low ...