A Short Trip to Chapel Hill

I had been in the middle of writing my full wrap up post from Rome, but I never got around to choosing my best pictures. So it's still sitting in my drafts...

BUT I've been encouraged and asked to blog about my current, albeit short, trip to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. So here goes...

A few months ago, I received an email from a parent volunteer, asking if there was any chance I could come out to North Carolina and speak to the students at Chapel Hill, East Chapel Hill, and Carrboro High Schools about scholarships.

I was flattered to say the least and excited at the opportunity to share about scholarships with students. So after much planning led by their wonderful parent volunteer, who is an absolutely amazing individual, the College and Career Information Center (CIC) coordinators, and fundraising from the PTSAs of Chapel Hill/Carrboro City Schools, I finally arrived in Chapel Hill this morning after a red-eye flight from Seattle last night.

I've never been to North Carolina before, so this was a neat opportunity to visit the East Coast and share my scholarship tips with students, teachers, and parents. I left Seattle at 10 PM last night and arrived in Washington Dulles around 5:45 AM Eastern Standard Time, so 2:45 AM back in Seattle. After an almost three hour layover in Dulles, I left for Raleigh/Durham and arrived in North Carolina at 9:15 AM EST.

Phew! Needless to say, I didn't sleep much on the plane, and I used some of that time to prepare for my two presentations today--one to the seniors and some juniors at Chapel Hill High School and a second to the parents of students from Chapel Hill, East Chapel Hill, and Carrboro High Schools.

Aileen, the amazing parent volunteer at Chapel Hill High School, picked me up at the airport and, after a quick breakfast bagel, drove me to my hotel. I arrived to find a nice welcome basket, signed "The Scholarship Fairy," whom I figured out was the CIC Coordinator at Chapel Hill High School, Linda. Check it out!

Anyway, the presentations today went very well, and it was great to speak with the students today. It's definitely easier speaking to students because I can connect with them, having been in their shoes only three years ago. Also, they are much more responsive and emotional (which is great for keeping a positive and exciting atmosphere in a large auditorium), whereas talking to parents/adults is a bit more challenging. You can't use quite the same approaches as with high school students.

But overall, I really enjoyed my day today, even with the little sleep I got. I didn't feel too tired, which is good. But more importantly, I enjoyed the opportunity to connect with students, parents, teachers, and counselors who are part of an incredibly supportive community in Chapel Hill. I had some great conversations with both Linda and Aileen today and got to learn a bit more about Chapel Hill and North Carolina.

Tomorrow, I have two more presentations--one each at the other schools. Between them, I'll be having lunch with Aileen at what she said was a great place on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus and then getting a bit of a tour around the area. I can't wait!

Then at 5:15 PM EST, it's back to the West Coast, arriving at 11 PM Seattle time...back to a make-up German 221 test Thursday morning, back to my reading for EURO 301, back to more paper for my Rome study abroad program, and a whole lot more. My brief time in Chapel Hill has been great, and I'm looking forward to tomorrow's presentations. Time for bed!

Heading Home

After more than two weeks of daily blogging, my streak came to an end yesterday. Sad day.

I was too exhausted from a long day yesterday and had too little sleep the night before, so I heeded my own advice about not blogging unless I was more than 75% awake and went straight to bed. I have to say though I'm proud that I kept up the daily blogging this year as opposed to only blogging twice during a five week program (a.k.a. my HIA experience in Berlin).

So, to catch up.

Yesterday was our last day of class, so we spent the morning at the Iqbal Masih school again, although this time we actually got to sit on classes.

The first class that I went to was part of the preschool and the students were all four years old. I don't even remember what I did at four years old, but it was nice to be a kid playing with wooden blocks on the floor again.

We had split into smaller groups to visit classes, so Manka, Sterling, and I joined our host teacher in this class of four year olds. At first, Sterling and I felt really awkward in the class because we couldn't speak Italian and being the much older "intruders" we weren't given the warmest welcome.

But Manka encouraged us to just start mingling with the kids, so we got on the floor and tried to join the fun. All I could say was "Come si chiama?" to ask their names and then introduce myself. After that, the rapid flow of Italian went in one ear and out my other. The blank look on our faces gave away our inability to speak Italian, so they lost interest and moved to another corner of the room.

The experience though was also an eye-opening one and a sort of time-warp back to my childhood when I helped translate for a Chinese kid in my preschool class (whoa, I guess I do remember back to then). He didn't speak English, so I had to help translate for him in class. The details are fuzzy for me, but I've heard stories from my parents. =P

But I also could relate to the new immigrant children coming into an Italian school. There is much less diversity and fewer classmates you could relate to if you don't speak Italian. That being the case for both Sterling and me as we sat in the middle of the play area, we both started just building little things out of the wooden blocks by ourselves. I made a Jenga-like tower with the thin wooden 4-inch planks. I got it to be about a foot tall before one of the little boys came over with a mischievious grin on his face.

He had a single wooden plank clutched in his fist, and as he hovered over my tower, he turned to his female classmate next to him to ask if he should drop the plank into the middle of my tower. She approved enthusiastically, so it was "bombs away" with the plank-dropping. All of the kids wanted to join in in destroying the tower, so after about three planks, they just grabbed the whole thing and knocked it over.

Although I was a bit dismayed that my tower had just been destroyed (not really), it was a nice way of connecting with them. We laughed and then, just like that, they went back to their games.

So, I lined the planks up like dominos.

I'm not sure if they'd ever played with dominos as one of the boys came over and had a confused look on his face. I knocked the first plank down and the whole row fell in succession. He was pretty surprised to see that and so we made another one together with a few curves. At this point, we had to leave, so he knocked the row down and went back to his games. It was a pretty fun experience though and a nice reminder of what it's like to be a kid again.

The second class we went to was a bit older. I thought they were around second or third grade. They were in the middle of their spelling lesson, so Jasmine, Irene, and I watched from the back of the room. It reminded me of third grade when our spelling contest hit a wall after no one could figure out how to spell "autumn."

The funniest thing that we saw in the class was actually right before they left for lunch--they lined up to get soap from one of the students (who won the stampede to find the soap dispenser) and then lined up to get a towel stuffed in the front of their shirt to dry their hands (the bathroom was down the hall). Their system seemed to work well.

The class itself was not diverse at all though. Everyone was Italian. We had learned that the school had a large Roma community, but because of recent moves by the right-wing government, those families had moved away from their camp. One teacher was extremely upset by these recent developments because the school had worked for twenty years to develop the trust and relationship to integrate the Roma students into the school. Now, she didn't know where a lot of those families had gone because the entire community had left after the unwelcome approaches of the government. It's definitely something I want to learn more about, and I did find some info on the European Commission's website too.

After this, we headed back towards the Rome Center to a restaurant nearby for our last group meal. It was a nice Italian meal, but I was stuffed after the pasta and couldn't finish much else.

Our final scheduled component was meeting with G2, a second generation immigrant youth organization, started by young people who grew up as the children of immigrants in Italy. The country has extreme problems in integrating this population because they are not immigrants (most were either born in Italy or have grown up in Italy since a very young age) but they are treated as foreigners.

It was an incredibly rewarding discussion, and I learned a lot from them. Over the next three months ass Brukab and I write our paper on the challenges of accessing higher education for children from immigrant backgrounds in Italy, it will be intriguing to talk more with them. I will share more of these thoughts when I get a chance to debrief about my trip (I will try and write a long post about the entire program after I get back to Seattle--keep me accountable please).

That was a great way to end out program. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time in Rome and definitely learned a ton. Manka is an awesome professor and definitely put together a fantastic program.

Brukab and I finished our night by going out to do a bit of shopping in Rome. We ended up going back the Trevi Fountain, so I could take a panoramic picture of it at night (my battery died yesterday). I haven't had time to stick it together, so that'll go in my final post too. Here's one we did get though:

Today, we're checking out of our apartment (I should be packing right now), and then dropping off our stuff at the Rome Center. We can't stay in the apartment for the night for some reason, so we're camping out with everyone at the airport for our 12 pm flight tomorrow. This afternoon though, I'm going to go to the Etruscan Museum, so I can see one last AP Art History piece.

Not sure I'll have internet before I get home, so my next post will most likely be when I've returned to Seattle (I arrive around 5 pm on Saturday Seattle time). It's been a fantastic five weeks in Rome and an even better summer after spending 10 out 16 weeks in Europe. I'm bummed to have to leave, but this upcoming school year will be another fun and exciting one.

Ciao from Rome!

An Evening in Rome

I think I'm around 76% awake, so I decided to blog about today before I hit the sack.

First, if you ever get a chance to come to Rome, definitely explore the city at night. It's amazing! I'll get to that in a bit.

Today was the day of our final presentations, so we pretty much spent the day preparing for that. We had a short class to get together at 10 AM, and then within a few minutes after, we all split to work on our projects before our run-through at 2 pm.

As I've mentioned previously, Brukab and I focused on the challenges to accessing higher education for immigrant students in Italy. Because of our experiences in America have shaped our perception of higher education in terms of social mobility very definitively, we sought to understand what higher education meant for social mobility in Italy, particularly for immigrant students.

What we found was a sort of double standard, one where it's generally accepted that higher education opens doors to new opportunities, but also that higher education is not necessary for achieving economic success. We were curious how this perception changed from one population to the next, so we researched what the perceptions of and challenges to higher education are in relation to social mobility for immigrant students.

The results showed that, for immigrant children, there is a certain assumption that they don't have money so college is not an option. As such, we wanted to do further research on how these perceptions change based on whether the students are 1st or 2nd generation immigrants, the effect of socioeconomic class and privilege, and their citizenship status.

We thought perhaps there'd be support programs that help guide immigrant students along in this process, but there are none, or very few if any, programs that exist to help immigrant students access higher education. We still have much to learn, but we're excited about writing this paper over the next three months.

The presentations were a great success. We only had five minutes per group, so we had to be very speedy, and I think everyone did a great job. Turnout was fairly small, only three people outside of our class, but it was a great environment to have rich discussions.

After our presentations, we decided to go out and explore Rome by night. We'd been thinking about our presentations and class stuff for several nights, so we never took the time to go explore in the evening. Our group consisted of me, Brukab, Jasmine, Irene, Trina, Manmeet, Jamie, and Lia.

Our plan was to see the Colosseum at night because many of us had only seen it during the day. But Manmeet wanted to see the Pantheon at night, so we took a side trip over there. I wanted to see the Trevi Fountain at night, so we decided to move towards that direction too.

By this time, the sky was fairly dark, so all the lights were on. Definitely very pretty all around!

Finally, after all that walking, we hopped on a bus toward the Colosseum. It was definitely not as crowded at night compared with during the day. We took plenty of pictures (although my battery was dying) and got half of them of the girls jumping in mid-air.

By the time we finished our photos at the Colosseum, it was about 10 PM, but we had a crazy idea to head over to St. Peter's in the Vatican.

So back on the bus we went.

The only time I had been to St. Peter's was when Steffen was here, and we spent the whole day there then. I'll tell you, the whole environment changes at night. I got some good shots from the ground. Check it out!

After the long and exhausting day, we headed back to our apartment and food. I realized that I really had not eaten anything other than a peach and a few cookies/biscuits/crakers. Nice to eat more leftover pasta! Always delicious. =P.

Tomorrow is really our last full day here in Rome. We'll be at the Iqbal Masih school until around 12:30 and then our final group lunch right after. We'll have a bit of the afternoon free--to do shopping and such--until we meet back at 5:30 PM with youth leaders of the G2 organization, a second generation immigrant youth program.

Well, now I've gone from 75% sort of tired to 45 % extremely exhausted. I'm falling asleep! It's time for bed...

Don't blog when you're not at least 75% awake...

Wow.

I just woke up and reread what I wrote last night. In between a few head drops and falling asleep on my keyboard, I only managed to write about half of my post correctly. The other half I do not know where it came from.

I actually cleaned it up a bit before I posted it too, otherwise you probably would've read random things about McDonald's, churches, and imagined experiences that I had in Rome.

Anyway, I went back and corrected my post. One important thing I got completely wrong (no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it the first time)--teachers do not order supplies for students. Students have to buy all of their own books for class, so they have a textbook list.

As such, many of the students in class didn't have their books with them (only two out of 20 actually), but then again, it was the first day of class for them, so it's understandable.

Presentations are tonight, so class and then prepping for presentations today. We're going to go and explore Rome at night after the presentations today, so if I'm not falling asleep on my laptop again, I'll post pictures.

Otherwise, I'll wait until I'm fully awake again to write a decent post. =]

Italian Schools and Universities

Now that school has started for kids in Italy, our class is visiting quite a number of schools this week. This morning, we headed back to the Manin Middle School at the central district office building. We split into three groups of five and all attended different classes. My group sat in on the History and Geography class. I was excited at first because history and geography are two of my favorite subjects.

But, boy, did it get boring quickly.

Aside from the fact that everything was in Italian, the teacher leading this group of 20 fifth graders liked to lecture a little too much. Honestly, I was shocked that the kids were handling things so well. I don't remember having a lecture like this in 5th grade. In fact, I don't remember really getting a lecture like this until high school maybe. Then again, I went to a school for many years where I learned out of booklets instead of from a teacher teaching the class...

Sitting in the back of the classroom, you definitely notice a lot more things. I noticed some of the boys in the back, picking on a young boy, whom Manka said seemed to be having trouble catching up. The stuff they were doing--like putting their hands on the boy's books--stuff that little boys in 5th grade do to annoy other kids. The teacher didn't pay any attention though, and in fact, seemed a bit of touch with what goes on in a classroom.

She had the class follow along as one of the students read out loud, which would've been a neat experience except that many of the students did not have school supplies. If I were a kid in her class, I would've fallen asleep through this experience.

The school itself was extremely diverse. I spent a few minutes talking to Melissa and Elena, who were Chinese. It was nice to put my Chinese to action.

After the visit, a bunch of us went to the Santa Maria Maggiore Church right outside the school. 'Twas pretty massive. A few pictures below:

At the University of Rome campus, ...

In the afternoon, we headed to the University of Rome to speak with some graduate and doctoral students who are in a masters program focusing on immigration. It was interesting because while all the grad students were interested in immigration, but not as a many of them focused on education.

Our conversation at the University of Rome was mostly just an open forum where we could discuss some of the challenges that immigrant children face. We stayed a bit longer afterward to talk with the grad students to get their thoughts on our research.

Tomorrow, we have to present on our topic at the Rome Center and still have a bit of work to do on our PowerPoint. Alright, I'm going to bed. Completely exhausted...I keep writing random things in my blog as I'm struggling to stay awake to write this. More tomorrow!