Day 14

My first few days working at the academy, there was a gigantic elephant in the room: race. At one point, the AIM Academy was Stacy and me, two White people, telling three Black kids how they were supposed to behave. I think it's often taboo for us to talk about race these days - we like to sweep all the race-related problems under the rug, but they're there. And you'd better believe those three kids noticed that they were Black and we were not.

Now, the majority of our mentors are Black. It shouldn't matter, but I think it helps.

The student group is more diverse at the moment.

Interestingly, it seems most of the people working with AIM are also women. One of my tasks this summer is going to be investigating why young men don't seem to be interested in mentoring, and how we can attract them to this job. I'm personally not surprised to learn it's hard for us to get men, but I can't think off the top of my head why that might be.

The last three days have been a sort of breakthrough for me. Things were pretty challenging at the beginning - I struggled to relate to these kids, fought to find a way to work with them. Then, this Tuesday, everything seemed to flip. It was a good day in general, with all the students being pretty engaged in what was going on, but it was a great day for me. Suddenly, I had their respect. Not their grudging deference as someone they had to listen to or go back to jail, but their respect. That was great.

We just got a few new students who seem to be pretty good guys, so I'm looking forward to the next ten days.

Today I had a meeting with my mentor to outline what I'll be doing. I've solidified my role helping facilitate the academy, both by leading lessons and by designing some new stuff. I'll also be doing some research on the side on how grassroots movements grow, which I'm afraid will highlight my stunning incompetence as a researcher. But the part I'm most excited about was an idea brought up by my housemate Ben last night. Ben is an intern at Big Car, an art gallery downtown with a bit of a social mission. We're going to try to work together to come up with an art expression workshop for the students. It will be challenging, but I'm interested to see where it goes.