Investing in Service

It's Sunday! And I am actually posting on time this time! hahaha...

This week we had a campus wide staff meeting about our school's expansion. If you don't know, my school is expanding their charter and will add 1st grade next year, 2nd grade in 2014 and so on, all the way up to 5th grade. So the meeting was held to inform us on the changes and served as an opportunity to ask questions and brainstorm ideas for the school's future.

About an hour into the meeting, the founder of my school split our 45-person staff into four groups to discuss four major topics. Each group was assigned one topic. My topic: Embracing Diversity. As we started discussing the ways to cultivate awareness and pride in each culture in our school, we also discussed how special needs seminars and workshops should be offered as well to help educate the people (including staff) of our school.

Once that streamline of thought started to fizzle out, I suggested social justice and what that could look like in terms of diversity of world views and societal views to our kids. The founder of my school was sitting in on this part of the conversation and she asked me to expand on my thought process.

After two years of being engrossed in social justice and spreading knowledge and stories of experience, I jumped at the opportunity to take the floor. So I dove in. I explained how as teachers we are more than educators of academics but we also want to raise kind, thoughtful, giving, socially aware human beings as well. I through some ideas out there like: campus wide dedication to service. For example: Kindergarten writes letters every month to different nursing homes, veterans hospitals, etc. 1st Grade: Cleans up the school or neighborhood. and it keeps going until they get to 4th or 5th Grade where, the ball is now in their court and they have to brainstorm a service project to plan out and implement...i.e. coat drives, getting stop signs put up in areas that need them, etc.

The founder of my school started to get really excited about this and asked me if we could even take it a step further and develop a curriculum around what social justice is. I felt on fire with ideas and starting spitting out: well, we could have different populations each month like homelessness, the environment, the elderly, low income children, immigration, gender equality, etc. The founder of my school pulled me aside after the meeting and asked if I wanted to sit on the committee for this topic and I emphatically agreed.

To get to my point. Through my time with Agape, I realized how much children can do and how little we think they can do. I always underestimate the power of a child; but to be perfectly frank , their idealism, their creativity, their excitement, their lack of bitterness (that comes with aging) is what will change the world for the better. I don't want to wait until kids are 15 to start promoting social justice driven actions, I want to start at 5. I want a 5-year-old to look at a homeless person and think, "wait, I learned about this in school...he's just like me;" instead of whatever stereotype that could possibly be ingrained into their brains thereafter. I want to beat the stereotype to the punch. I want to invest in kindness and love for ones neighbor as much as we invest in reading, writing and math. Because what good are the academia if the person is selfish, rude, mean and uncaring of others' sufferings?

I am excited to begin working on the curriculum and brainstorming ideas and projects and lessons that will shape the attitudes these kids have about the marginalized and the poor. I'm excited to invest in service and I think I might've found my future career path...who knows...but this framework really gives me energy and excitement. Stay tuned!