Red Stuff, Parachutes and Sneakers

"Pika Pika!" one of the girls screamed as she banked a corner of the cafeteria at a full tilt, "Kelsey fell down and there is red stuff everywhere and everybody's flipping out!"

Following her back I rounded the corner of the cafeteria to the tray return and was met with the sight of almost everything being covered in red. When I found out it was just rather thick kool-aid I nearly killed that messenger.

My first real job at the fine age of 17 when, due to a series of incredibly bizarre events, I was "2nd in command" so to speak for a middle-school girl scout sleep-away science and engineering camp. If this was the government we'd wind up with the sort of acronym middle managers find a sexual attraction to out of that mess. Something like MS GS SASEC? If it doesn't make a word yet we can always add some vowels like "Advancement" and "Achievement" and "Excellence" until fluent English speakers have a chance at actually saying it.

Anyway, long story short, I was still young enough (and looked young enough) to be mistaken for a middle school girl in the eyes of adults and yet I was responsible for taking care of them. It was rather exciting.

I can respect why taking students camping on a campsite is such a popular activity. Probably the two most dangerous things that could happen would be students wandering away from the campsite unauthorized and playing in the campfire. If you leave one counselor near the cooking fire and take frequent headcounts both these risks can be mitigated. All that's left after that is slaying spiders and convincing spoiled brats that they do in fact want to eat the food you are providing them because there won't be more coming.

This event was held at a local university. It is amazing how much trouble students can get into on a university campus. Even simple things like handing students between the ages of 11 and 13 access to an infinite supply of Mountain Dew (read: the school cafeteria's soda fountain) can have very exciting results.

The program overlapped with summer courses there and the world peace conference, who was so mad at us they were filing complaints and coming up and shouting from time to time. I guess that says something about my charges when we managed to piss off a world peace conference. Personally, I never knew repeatedly doing the Cha-cha slide was such a grievous offense, although I do understand the contempt earned when we set off the elevator alarm the fourth time in a single week.

Often enough I was left taking care of the girls entirely myself for brief periods of time.

We had just been forced to remove some girls from the program prematurely due to a disciplinary issue and to say morale was low was a bit of an understatement. The head of the program took half the girls swimming and I was left with the task of cheering up the rest.

"So," I bounced into the room holding the official activity manual, "Who wants to do some science experiments?"

The girls turned and faced me with only the most basic gesture of interest they felt they owed to an authority figure. Quickly I flipped open an activity and pitched the description. They remained completely expressionless. I tried a second one. Their eyes reminded me of laser sights on a sniper rifle, all trained on me.

"How about," I grappled with a moment for an idea, "We make some parachutes and throw things out a window in them?"

The middle schoolers tried briefly for a moment in vain to sound like they considered this idea boring too before curiosity broke them down.

"Really?" one asked.

"Can we ride it?"

"No people," I answered, "we'll only put things are ok to lose on them."

"I've got a second pair of sneakers that are ratty and only for playing in the mud, can I send those?"

"Yeah that will be great."

Two carefully sliced and taped trash bags and a ball of twine later I'm leaning out of the 9th story window with our latest creation. Far below I can see some of the girls milling around excitedly and looking along my level I can see more heads poking out windows.

"Ready?" I ask the chorus.

"Ready!"

I released the contraption and it fell a few feet before the parachute properly plumed out. I could hear the kids cheering below. For the split second before the parachute abruptly changed course I felt like everything was looking up. After that there was a lot more eye-rolling on my part.

"Alright," I said to the girl who was looking rather forlornly at her sneakers dangling someplace near the 5th story window, "go get your other sneakers."

"What other sneakers?"

"The ones that made those ones ratty spares."

"Oh," she looked a little sheepish and nervous at this point, "I don't actually have a second pair of sneakers. I just really wanted to you to choose to send my stuff down in the parachute."

I handed her a pair of my flipflops and headed to the elevator with the other students.

The 5th floor is a somewhat bad place to get something stuck. None of us were strong enough to throw something high enough to knock it loose, and the only windows we had access to throw things down from was the 9th floor. I unlocked the sports equipment and sent two of the more mature girls up with a bag of soccer balls and basketballs. The rest of us had the duty of making sure nobody was nearby when she threw.

One of the students, Alex, was leaning out the window and scouting the area when a little old lady walkered her way past. Her badge read that she was from the conference below.

"Is that little girl going to jump?" she asked.

I assured her she wasn't and she went away, seeming content. The fact that campus police showed up about 5 minutes after she left makes me believe she in fact, wasn't. The officer didn't even really try to keep a straight face as I explained to him that we were removing a parachute of shoes from a tree, but he didn't seem annoyed by our activities. He was preparing in fact to pack up and leave when Alex poked her face out of the 9th floor window clutching a basketball in two hands. She wound up her throw the whole way so both hands were above her head before noticing the officer, at which point her jaw dropped and quickly withdrew into the room, still clutching the basketball.

"That little girl," the officer grinned, finding an opportunity to give me shit, "she wasn't about to throw that was she?"

"Of course not officer."

"You'd better make sure she knows that."

"Alex," I shouted, "don't throw anything out the window."

"I'm not sure she can hear you," the officer said, "why don't you make her come to the window?"

Alex didn't want to go to the window. Alex mostly wanted to hide up there and pretend that if she acted like the cop didn't exist that he wasn't there. After some significant time she finally peered out the window and the police man shouted at her for a bit, and then left.

At the end of the week it was time to return the students to their parents. I watched the shoeless girl, still in my flipflops, run up to her parents. Following her slowly I greeted them and then chose my words carefully.

How much would a new pair of sneakers for her cost me? Poor kids don't normally go to summer camp, was it a nice 70 dollar pair I had lost? The parents were notably well-dressed and seemed the sort of people who really cared about brand names. I upped my estimate to 130.

"I'm very sorry," I said, "but your daughter's shoes seem to have been misplaced during the course of camp."

The mom looked slightly confused, "Misplaced?"

"Well, actually I do know where they are, they're in a tree near the fifth floor of the dorms. We couldn't get them down." The mother's eyebrows crashed together for a moment and she looked at me skeptically. "I'd be pleased," I added, "to pay for a replacement pair of shoes since they were lost under my supervision."

"These were...white shoes? Red stripe on the side? Pink shoelaces?"

I nodded.

The woman suddenly lept forward and hugged me, "That's WONDERFUL sweetie."

"Uh...what?"

"We bought her new shoes simply ages ago and she just insists on wearing those old ratty ones because she likes them. We've tried everything, and its just an embarssment to have her running around like that you know? Makes it look like we don't provide for her. I can't believe this...this is wonderful...what an excellent job."

"Really...uh...it was nothing..."

"Oh no, no I need to talk to your boss. You did a great job this week."

Re: I'm sorry you feel that way

I have been meaning to start this blog for a while now, but I previously was waiting for the time to make a nice proper blog with my internet skills, so I just wrote some posts and stashed them away. Turns out I have yet to have time to make a nice blog, but I do feel like digging out these old posts and seeing what I can make of them. Here's one.

This blog was inspired a lot by the work of Violent Acres. This particular post was written in response to this item of her work. For those of you a little too lazy to click, its a rant about how the words "I am sorry you feel that way" are a cover for people to feel good about themselves while still being assholes.

I'm going to disagree with her. I'm not going to say that phrase doesn't mean exactly what she says it does or that it isn't insulting or degrading.

However, it is still sometimes highly appropriate for the situation at hand.

Mentoring and teaching were my formal sources of employment from ages 16 to 19. The age gap between me and my students was often as small as six months. To compound this I look very young. Tomorrow I will be 22 but even today people still ask me from time to time what high school I am attending.

I never had problems earning and keeping the respect of my students. You may say this shouldn't be something to brag about as all humans naturally deserve respect but reality doesn't work that way. As it was, I worked hard to earn my student's respect (not friendship) and to keep my classes and teams organized and well-functioning. My success in this was a source of great pride.

I had tremendous problems earning the respect of these children's parents. This was not as much so for the parents of the poor high school children. These parents spoke broken English more often than not and frequently worked two jobs. They saw the extra-curricular semi-academic club I mentored as their daughter's opportunity to make something of herself.

No, it was the suburban, white, middle-class-who-lived-like-upper-class, SUV driving, soccer mom banshees who glare at you from behind movie-star sunglasses even while indoors with a cell phone surgically grafted to the palm of one hand who gave me trouble. I taught their precious darlings in an expensive semi-academic summer camp, which many parents of this type more closely equated to babysitting they did not have to feel guilty about constantly leaving their child in. It was academic wasn't it? Surely throwing money into what might be considered their child's future was an adequate replacement for an actual bond with their child, wasn't it? Besides, they had golf games to get to or a nail appointment. Junior could cope.

I took the job because I was poor, in college, and tuition is steep. I only worked there one summer.

I was easily the youngest councilor there. Worse than that, I still equated myself to being somewhat of a child, above my students, but deferring to the power of "actual adults." I called them "Mr." or "Mrs." while still permitting them to use my first name. When they complained I would apologize that I had caused their child unhappiness and ask for their input on how to improve the situation. These self-absorbed child-parents sensed this as a weakness and fell upon it in a manner which strongly reminded me of those wildlife documentaries where a lion chases and brings down the slowest gazelle in the pack.

They complained about some fairly ridiculous things. They called and said they didn't think their child should have to share class materials, couldn't I make one team of five and leave their child with their own kit instead of using the same resources to make two teams of three? They called and claimed that the reason their child wasn't doing well was because their child was bored by my lesson plans and had not signed up to learn what I was teaching. Couldn't the child just use class time and materials to explore their own interests? The winning line was a livid call to my boss, Big Mike, from one particularly proud mother who claimed "Pika doesn't understand the unique challenge and privilege she had teaching somebody as gifted my son."

It was evident their children heard these calls, quite possibly on speaker phone as they were made. The next morning they would talk back or act out for a few hours before the normal order could be reestablished. The other students might not have noticed but I found it stressful and frankly a waste of my time.

My boss had chosen long ago to set up his office in the corner of the room I used as my classroom. He had witnessed all of this, fielding the better part of these confrontations via the phone himself. One day I found myself in a conversation with him about how he handles confrontation with irrational customers. I do not remember how it started but I will probably never forget this line:

"I stopped saying sorry. I found this afforded me a great deal of power in these conversations."

I remember sitting there not totally convinced, and I not-so-subtly hinted as much. I'm incredibly lucky I had such nice bosses early in my career who pseudo-parented me or God knows where I would be.

He persisted, making it slowly quite evident that this was intended to be a lesson for me and that he did not have some bizarre desire to recount tales of his past to me arbitrarily. "When this happens to me, I apologize that the unfortunate situation has arisen, but when I apologize for my actions I am revealing what some people consider to be a weakness." He explained how certain people cling to these perceived weaknesses and how sometimes it was unwise to expose such an opportunity to people who were essentially complete assholes. He said it all much more subtly and much less condescendingly than that. Big Mike was a very gifted communicator. I know that compliment sounds like bullshit and the skill of communication has been ramshacked by talentless dolts who believe it an appropriate major to compliment their participation in college sports but this man was the real deal.

I listened politely to his wisdom and then promptly ignored him.

Another crop of students came and went with another crop of zealous parents.

Big Mike took pity on me and at this point just asked that I forward all storming parents directly to him. Not only did he dislike watching them skewer me but he also was finding it troublesome to derail the momentum of righteous indignation these people had built up by the time they got to him.

At some point during the batch after that I was caught by an unhappy parent in person in the hallway. She was a platinum blond piece of work. I have never been much into fashion but everything about the way she walked reeked of the fact that she had paid too much for her clothing and that she was proud of it. She had the obligatory cell phone and in one hand and she would from time to time pull her overly large oakley sunglasses down the bridge of her nose to glare at me over the top of them. It was during one of these brief moments of condescending eye contact that she paused to draw breath.

"I'm sorry" I interrupted.

The woman's eyes were lit up and I watched a thin line of a smile draw across her face. Creepy barely describes the situation. I felt like a deer in headlights.

"...that you feel that way."

The smile stopped short and suddenly the woman did not seem nearly as tall anymore. As a matter of fact I felt like I could nearly watch her crumple up like a piece of paper. I had just demanded that she respect my authority instead of constantly deferring to hers. The glasses rapidly snapped up to obscure her eyes. She was talking again but instead of seeming intimidating she reminded me more of a small dog that barks too loudly. The reality was that she probably had not changed much at all, but my mind perceived all these differences because, for the first time, I was in control of this conversation.

"Do you want...to speak to my manager?"

"I'll call him later. I'm too busy right now," she announced swinging her purse and flouncing down the hallway as the cell phone snapped back up to her ear.

Big Mike says she never did.

Hype

"So what are you doing next year?"

I do my very best to never have favourites among the students I mentor, but I'm looking at the kid who I could probably reasonably call a backbone of the team. He's bright, he's humble, and he works as hard as anybody. He's also personally a sizable percentage of the manpower on the team despite the fact that he is only one of many students. He's blinking back tears.

"I...didn't get in."

"What?"

In the shop back in January I'm running lengths of wood through a table saw. High schoolers can't run this machinery themselves due to liability reasons so I do the cutting. The student is handing me marked pieces to cut and I'm flicking him the good portions I cut off.

"Is it hard to get into your school?" he asks me quietly.

"Not at all. They really haven't got any standards anymore, they're letting everybody in."

The kid visibly brightens, "Do you think I'll get in?"

"Oh absolutely."

I remember the topic coming up at nearly every practice for the next two weeks. Apparently this kid dreamed of my university and thought of it pretty constantly. I told him it would get it for sure, and even at times encouraged him to apply to another school or two that was more difficult than my own, just so he could push himself and maybe luck out at a place with a better endowment and thus better financial aid. I acted like it was inconceivable that he wouldn't be admitted. I remember giving a few seniors as a group the "These things are all done by humans and you must always do your best, but sometimes after that its just luck what happens" speech but I did not think to impress on the kid that my school was like that too and even though he should get in easily accidents do happen. The honest-to-God reason for this is that it was simply inconceivable in my mind that I had ever been admitted to this place and that he wouldn't be. His GPA blew mine out of the water, his SAT scores were comparable (converted back of course, when I was in high school we had no written third portion), and over the span of three years, according to his story, he had taught himself all of his English after immigrating from a chunk of the ex USSR. He speaks beautifully now. He came from a poor neighborhood in a bad part of the city and went to a rough school. He had a perfectly clean disciplinary record, and I don't see how an admissions director wouldn't just love him in an interview. This kid was the living embodiment in my mind of the American Dream. I'm more proud of him than I can tell you.

Its May again. The kid's looking at the brick walkway we're standing on because he doesn't want to be seen crying. I don't blame him. I pretend to not notice the intermittent sniffles because that's what he wants.

The campus is beautiful this time of year. The whole of it is green and alive, and the flower buds haven't quite dropped from the trees yet but the leaves have grown. The have a light green vibrancy to them not yet baked off by the constant days of sunshine into a darker green. Behind him some college kids play frisbee barefoot. The sky overhead is blue and the air is warm. Its days like today they really ought to put on the postcards and admission brochures.

"This place is pretty nice," he says.

I nod. When a kid wants to change a topic at a time like this you don't press it. There is an uncomfortable silence for a few minutes before an adult who works at his school asks "so where are you going?"

The kid names a school that's basically a community college. No, he hasn't applied there yet. I remind him that the consortium permits him to take as many classes as he wants from my school for no extra charge if he attends that school. Am I being foolish acting like he could transfer over no problem? I still don't see why he couldn't, but I also don't see how he didn't get in in the first place.

"I have been bad," he says. "I haven't always given this my 100 percent. I deserve this."

He says he slacked, but his GPA is good. Maybe they knock it down a few more rungs because of the school he attended? Still, I do not get it. I bring him to one of my professors and ask him to explain the transfer in program.

"And he can still do it in four years right?" I ask after introducing them.

"Yes," my professor says, "If he works hard."

"Can I double major?"

The prof looks at him somewhat incredulously. "That's a lot of work son."

My blood boiled. Of course he could double major. This kid is very talented, and if he had just been admitted with the rest of the spoiled bratty freshman class he could do it no problem. Now he faces two years of condescension as he tries to transfer in here, only to probably be ultimately robbed of his chance to double major.

I remember sitting in a lecture hall of a large university as a junior in high school.

"Are you need blind?" a mother asks.

The presenter looks nervous, "No school is really 100% need blind, we have limited scholarship funds."

I'm poor, but on paper my family doesn't look as poor as this kid's, not by a long shot. This kid would need nearly a full ride, he would have to commute all four years because he couldn't afford dorm space. A white male commuter student at a school which is trying to increase its school spirit and the cohesiveness of the freshmen body, and they probably had a high number of drop-outs of kids in this kid's profile.

I don't even want to write that here. I don't want to believe that could possibly be what held this kid back. Its completely disgusting. This kid is a self-made-man, he knows what he wants to do with his life, and he needs this degree to do it legally speaking. He knows the meaning of hard work, and he's dedicated to his cause. That alone blows 95% of freshmen out of the water.

The adult who works at this kid's school keeps pressing for information. "How many other schools did you apply to?"

Apparently only one. He got rejected from that too.

"How did your interview here go? Did you remember to dress up for it?"

The kid looked surprised, "They have interviews?"

She's frustrated now. "Who helped you with your admission applications?"

The kid seemed uneasy, "nobody helped me, I figured it out..."

"These things have a lot of unwritten rules to them," I said, "we would have helped you. You realize that's why I'm here right? I want to help you guys."

"And now that we know, we're going to do everything we can to help you," the other mentor said.

The kid looked up from the bricks and grinned. Those are the smiles you live for, when a kid finally gets that somebody in the world gives a fuck.

The soda can girl and I were sitting out at dusk for a moment taking a small break. The other kid was inside.

"He didn't seriously get rejected from here did he? I thought you said he would get in for sure."

I wince, embarrassed that his peers caught wind of my completely unwaivering confidence in this kid and how it hadn't quite panned out.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm not sure what happened. He must have mailed his application in late or something."

"You should ask him," she said.

"I don't think that will make his situation better right now."

I'm still so proud of this kid. I hope some day he believes me about that. I still believe he'll do great things someday, he just has a much harder road than most. I haven't got any way to say that to him without shouldering him with further expectations, but I wish I did. I wish I could give him the confidence to try again and to move forward. I wish I'd known nobody was overseeing his applications. I wish a lot of things, but mostly I just want him to know that we're not disappointed in him at all. He's still the same talented kid in my eyes, regardless of what some dumbass admission department says.

Also, I'm totally making college admissions of my students my business next year.

Making Captain Planet Proud

I was eating dinner with some of my kids. When I say "my kids" I refer to students who I mentor, not as in legal dependents. Normally the kids I mentor are in either high school or middle school. Its a rare circumstance that I have a single group with both ages in it.

I'm not sure why they are called "my kids." My mentor when I was in high school called us his kids, and my peers now who volunteer their time to other teams do the same. I think its just an idiosyncrasy of the league we all compete in.

Anyway, so I was with my kids. We were at a BBQ with easily 400 people at it which was hosted at my university. They had mostly finished their food and so I brought out the bags of candy I had purchased for them and opened them. One of the girls sat down next to me with her candy

"I don't want to put my soda can in the trash," she said.

"If you're willing to walk a bit I know where you can recycle it."

"They are throwing out a lot of soda cans."

"Yes"

"Do you think if I got another shirt from the car and put it on so nobody knew I was from our team...and maybe was really sneaky...that I could pull all the cans out of the trash and put them in a bag to be recycled?"

"I don't see why you would need to hide the fact that you're doing a good thing."

"I've always wanted to do it but I'm too nervous to do it alone. I'm afraid people will think I'm weird if I do it all alone." She looked contemplative for a moment and then turned to me as her face brightened up. "Will you help me?"

"What?"

I was at this point pretty stuck. I'm not altruistic enough to want to go digging through the trash just to make mother nature smile, but this seemed like it was a pretty big deal to the kid. Acting like her idea was childish seemed somehow emotionally the equivalent of stomping on her face. Besides, how many high schoolers do you know who give a flying fuck about anything that isn't themselves? How could you possibly discourage the one kid who does in front of all of her peers, and in doing so potentially even embarrass her for it?

"Yeah," I said, "sure I'll help you."

Two more kids followed us around and assisted with holding the trash bag and various other things while the first girl and I started pulling cans from the trash. It was absolutely nasty.

The kid seemed absolutely thrilled though, and seeing how happy she was doing this pretty much made up for how nasty it was to go through bins of Styrofoam plates and half-eaten burgers. Thankfully they had only been there about...half an hour tops. I'd also like to take this moment to announce that people who jam their napkins and the rest of their meals into the tops of their sodas are dickwads. I was kinda amazed though how much food was in that trash can. It seemed a crying shame that they had taken that food in the first place and not just left it for somebody else if they did not want to eat it.

We filled the better part of an industrial trash bag with cans. One girl stopped and mentioned she had been considering doing the same thing, and by the time we were wrapping up a reasonable number of high schoolers had showed up from various teams and begun asking if they could help us too. The student who originated the idea was pretty much beaming.

"Hah," one of the mentors laughed, "this your new team fund-raiser plan?" The girl waved the bag proudly about for a moment and the mentor laughed. "We can be team 'can do', one can at a time." I rolled my eyes because I loath puns but not an hour later I found somebody had written the new slogan on the back of our team's robot in black sharpie. The students were thrilled about it. They toted their trash bag of cans around with glee. If I had thought I could have gotten a picture of it without wrecking their moment I would have.

So today I either taught some kids a valuable life lesson about doing the right thing when you think you know what it is, or possibly simply exposed them and myself to a variety of communicable diseases. Perhaps both. Whatever, I'd do it again. The look on the kid's face was pretty worth it.

I'm sick of the ways people use Vex parts around here

See? Only had this a few hours and already two rants. My poor friends...put up with this for so many years...

Vex parts are an infestation in this school.

I've got a friend in a lab upstairs. His "senior project" is sitting near his desk. I think he did a second one. He's a brilliant guy. He did the electronics on that project, and they're absolutely beautiful. I'd hate to think that he has this project representing him forever and ever, because his partner did such a bad job on the mechanical side that it turned the whole project into a total piece of shit.

The machining is mediocre...well maybe that's being a little generous. By "mediocre" I mean to say that somebody waved a ruler somewhat in the vicinity of some stock tube aluminum and then threw this stock in a bandsaw. Then it was bolted together. I estimate each arm weighs at least a few pounds and is about a foot long on each of two links. These arms support a several pound body.

And its moved with Vex sprockets and chain. I'm sorry what? These little plastic pieces of shit? The ones that came out of a box of children's toys? You put those on a professional project and expect to be taken seriously?

These people spend tens of thousands of dollars on classes every year and sit through countless hours of lectures and homework. Then they come to their senior project. They could calculate the forces required and spec out proper parts... just like they spent four years training to do...

...or they could pick up some pieces from children's toys and bolt them on, call it a day, and stand there stunned when it doesn't work.

Another thing I can not stand is when people demolish Vex aluminum because they are too lazy to cut their own scrap pieces. They bend it up...rip it, break it...whatever...take a rather Its pretty absurdly expensive stuff to treat it like scrap. Its just not cost-effective. Nobody cares though, because its handy and its "not their money." (God, that's another rant in itself: the words "its not my money" make my blood boil.) This stuff gets picked up by students (they never buy it themselves) and just chucked on...everything.

I've fielded plywood robots. Fuck, I've fielded two competitive robots with cardboard on them with pride. But I was pretty ashamed to stand next to a robot with Vex used on it as temp scrap on it and said "yeah, that's ours."

That said, I'm not ashamed of my team, those kids are great. I wish I hadn't gotten the flu twice that competitive season so I could have spent more time mentoring them. They are really good kids. I'm proud of them.

I'm pretty not-proud though of that action. That action was basically somebody saying "well, I'm feeling pretty lazy right now so instead of slicing up 25 cents worth of stock aluminum on the bandsaw and putting a hole in it with a cordless drill I'm going to bend a rather expensive piece of metal so it will never be usable again." I'm definitely not proud that somebody did that particular behavior. S/he is still a good person, but s/he is still acting like a moron.

At least my high school kids? They'll admit they were being lazy when you call them on it and say sorry.

Some of the kids here? They just don't give a fuck. These people are going to make equipment which people's lives depend on: cars, tanks, airplanes, machinery, medical devices...the list goes on. You're going to spec those out right? You're going to suddenly care when you graduate and start doing your job right when you never did as an undergrad?

Nah, lets go get some kid's toys.