A Personal Border

During Speed-Dating, I shared a really bland story of how living in Seattle my entire life was a border of mines. However, after more thought, I thought of another "border" that has more significance to it.

In my senior year of high school, my cumulative senior project was on Spoken Word. For an action plan, I drew up a curriculum on performance poetry and got to teach a Speech class during 5th period. I got to work with a lot of underclassmen, who, more or less, were unmotivated to write. While their personalities were exuberant, their feelings towards writing were one of disdain and disinterest. They were horrified when I first introduced the "5-minute-free-writing," an exercise that encourages the writer to let their mind run rampage and write for five minutes without breaks in order to get their creative juices running. I experienced a lot of turbulence while teaching that class, it was a weird position for me because I was so used to being seen as a peer, but came to realize that the students had attached a "teacher" title to me because I stood in front of the board. This complicated things a bit: they relied on me to teach them the content, but at the same time, were afraid to open up to me because I was the authoritative figure.

*side note* I guess to make this more understandable, my school has experienced a history of low expectations from the local community, we were deemed as the "Ghetto School" because of our diversity, demographics, and issues of student achievement. But the problems lie deeper than the statistics, a lot of the students were dealing with personal problems at home, their neighborhoods, and friends. A lot of the students had a preconception that teachers at school were seen as "enemies" rather than potential helpers.

I knew that personalization had always helped me in my academics. So, I decided to break that border of title and differences, be it age, ethnicity, or background, and to get to know my peers/students. I noticed that as the conversations increased, barriers and walls started to come down. I learned so much from them as we discussed topics of issues in life, relationships, school, our futures, and our opinions on things. Our views differed from one another just as much as they had commonalities, too, but even more importantly, our bond as a class grew stronger as our trust deepened. The students' writing grew more complex and revealing, and their confidence in speaking up and ability to execute their performances well also increased. It was definitely a rough and rewarding experience, especially in overcoming barriers/borders.