After a Jayhawk victory over Illinois the group returned to the church where we are staying, showered, and feel quickly to sleep. Sleep passed far too quickly as six a.m. rolled around and I had to drag myself out of my warm sleeping bag and get ready for the first day of school. I slipped into my black and white polka-dot dress, black heels and felt prepared for anything that would come my way. I had no idea what I was getting myself into.
We hopped on the red line and after a certain stop the entire demographic of the train changed. The neighborhoods quickly became more run down and I found myself entering a completely different world from what I grew up in. I had officially left behind cattle and tall grass prairie for hip-hop, concrete, and city mentality. As we got off the bus I became a little nervous in the neighborhood but was put at ease by the smiling faces of the school children that we saw as we walked to the school. The security guard at the entrance awkwardly stared at us as we entered Ariel Community Academy but directed us to the office to wait. After ten minutes of waiting we decided to go find our teachers on our own. The school is a K-8 school but is strangely also attached to a charter school. Both have school uniforms and the Ariel kids wore blue collared shirts and khaki pants. My coordinator Ms. Beach was incredibly friendly and a Teach for America teacher who worked hard to set me up and schedule to help with different classrooms for the week.
School started in the auditorium where the school said the pledge of allegiance followed by their school pledge then each teacher took their homeroom off. My first task was to help the Kindergarten students with the school-wide recycling program. The program is a way for them to get funding for books and technology in exchange for helping the environment. Every item had to be scanned for the competition between schools and from what I could tell Ariel had a lot of movement behind their program considering it took me all morning to finish. I was relieved to wash my hands and head to the teacher’s lounge for lunch. The teachers’ lounge was so out of place at Ariel. The school itself was older and painted random bright colors but the lounge was a soothing nature theme far from the noisy hallway. The refrigerator had leaves stenciled on it, the walls were a crisp white, white lounge chairs edged the room with forest green accents. It was a relaxing environment with ambience lighting and helped me prepare for what I was about to encounter.
After lunch I was assigned to Ms. Lewensky’s Spanish class to help teach the fifth graders to salsa for an upcoming play. I had a blast with the Spanish music and excited children. Afterwards I chatted with her about the Spanish program at Ariel. She said the funding had been cut so to keep her position she had to teach math and that the language class was not able to be graded. I was really sad to hear that since I really love Spanish and think it is important to prepare kids for an interconnected world with other languages. I went back to Ms. Beach’s room and helped make permission forms for the school-wide financial field trips. I loved that they saw the importance of financial education in low-income neighborhoods. If they can save efficiently they can better their situations. The final class period of the day was close to beginning when a fight broke out in the hallway. The students went running and teachers broke it up. Ironically the class then had a scheduled “Calm Classroom” exercise. The exercise occurs several times during the day and consists of deep breathing and stretching to relieve stress and calm the students down before class so they are more manageable for the teachers. The day concluded with a game of financial soccer where the students answered questions to score points in Ms. Beach’s homeroom.
It was funny how quickly the students know you and who you are, perhaps because I was the only fair skinned blonde woman in the entire school. As we were walking back to the bus stop I heard a little girl yell out “Bye Miss Kaity! See you tomorrow!” It really felt good to know they knew who I was. The bus ride back was quick and once the group was together we went out for pizza at Lou Malnati’s to taste real Chicago deep dish. It was incredibly filling so we walked it off with a trip to Wrigley Stadium which was much farther than expected. It was quite a chilly night but the stadium was glowing and we had to take several pictures in front of it. We found the nearest “L” station and returned to the church where we played Apples to Apples, which if you have not played you certainly need to because it is hilarious with a large group. That was the end of our night and we showered and made lunch for tomorrow. Tomorrow I am going to check out other classrooms in Ariel and I hope it is just as entertaining, loud, and exciting as today was.
-Kaitlynn Nelson
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