Wheaton Bio

This is copied from a story Wheaton recently published on my work with City Year and Teach for America. You can find the actual story here.

My Wheaton education: The chance to explore and innovate in such a safe community was a unique opportunity that has shaped who I am now. I was given the opportunity to lead groups of my peers as a senior preceptor, work one-on-one with a professor in an independent study (thanks Professor Searles!), and help to design and implement two January freshman orientations. To come away from undergrad with these experiences under my belt is incredible.

Favorite memory: Jumping in the pond with my best friends after our senior year Chapel Ceremony. It was so slimy!

First job after graduation: I am currently a corps member in City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley. During the day, I tutor 6^th – 8^th grade students in literacy and math, as well as run after school programs that include homework help and academic enrichment clubs.

The rewards: The students, hands down. My students have seen and gone through so much, yet they are incredibly strong and passionate young people. My goal is to prove to each and every one of them that they have the ability to succeed, and to provide them with the tools they need to do so.

Secret to success: Perseverance and Wheaton connections! Every internship and position I’ve gotten has been at least in part due to a Wheaton alum stepping up to help me.

Proudest accomplishments: Graduating from Wheaton as the first ever Dance Studies major and getting accepted into Teach for America.

Next step, Teach for America: I developed a passion for education and multicultural psychology during my time at Wheaton (thanks Professors Peony Fhagen-Smith and Kirsten Olson!). When I was accepted as a City Year corps member, I knew that I was signing up for a challenging year. What I didn’t expect was to fall so madly in love with my students that they would inspire me to continue working for them beyond my single year of service. Although I have been passionate about educational equity for a number of years, never before did I realize the magnitude of our country’s crisis. I don’t just want to be involved in the solution; I want to be the solution.

For the next two years, I’ll be teaching special education in the Bay Area of California as a Teach for America corps member. I am thrilled to have been chosen for this position, and am excited to take this next step in my pursuit of educational equity for all students in America.

Thankful Thursday: STOMP

This is a post that I wrote for the City Year San Jose blog. You can find the link to the actual post here.

March 24, 2011

tags: Broadway San Jose, Music Village, STOMP

by City Year San José/Silicon Valley

Each week, City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley will thank a person or organization for inspiring us in our service. This week, corps member Laura Peters thanks Broadway San Jose Music Village and other members of the community for supporting her STOMP enrichment at Lee Mathson Middle School.

When corps member Nancy Adjei and I began planning a stepping and drumming enrichment for our after school program, we were excited to bring movement and musical concepts to the students we serve at Mathson Middle School. Little did we know how much further this idea would go!

A few days after the initial seed was planted, I remembered that I had seen the drum and dance performance STOMP advertised as coming to San Jose. Minutes later, I was on the Broadway San Jose website realizing that the show would be coming to the San Jose Center for the Performing Arts during the final week of our STOMP-themed enrichment!

I immediately called group sales. I was planning on applying for an Attendance, Behavior, and Course performance Grant and wanted to see if we could get a few tickets at a discounted price. Joe Noonan, our liaison at Broadway San Jose, posed the question,

“In a perfect world, how many tickets would you receive?”

I thought for a moment. I didn’t want to sound greedy, but I knew that my students deserved to go to this performance and it would be a great incentive to improve their behavior and attendance. I told Joe that in a perfect world, we could bring all of the corps members from Mathson as well as approximately 30 students.

Well, it turns out that it is a perfect world! Broadway San Jose has been able to secure 42 tickets for our corps members and students to attend STOMP this April. Students who are part of our STOMP enrichment and meet specific attendance and behavior criteria will be invited to join the Mathson City Year corps members for the traveling Broadway performance.

Once we had this ticket incentive, we began to focus on our actual enrichment. On Tuesdays and Thursdays for one hour, approximately 15-20 students meet in the cafeteria to make instruments, learn step routines, and combine their talents in preparation for a final performance.

We couldn’t have put on this enrichment without the help of Music Village in south San Jose who donated 20 pairs of drumsticks worth almost $100 in total. Our friends on the Civic Engagement Team right here at City Year San Jose allowed us to borrow paint buckets, which our kids will be using as makeshift drums. Teachers and corps members came together to donate paper towel rolls, beans and cups to be turned into rain sticks and maracas.

The STOMP enrichment has truly been a collaborative effort between City Year and our community. The students in STOMP are flourishing in their rhythmic abilities, as well as attempting to improve their own behavior and attendance. The students and corps members at Mathson sincerely appreciate all of the individuals and organizations who have helped to make this experience possible.

Laura Peters, Corps Member CYSJ

A night to remember

Recently, City Year San Jose hosted an event we call "Starry Starry Night," which is a gala/fundraiser that our organization holds each year. Each corps member was allowed to sit at a table with guests who had paid up to $150 for a ticket and dinner. I was placed at a table with the co-founder and other high-ranking members of NVIDIA, one of our corporate sponsors. During the "Fund-A-Need" portion of the night, my table donated over $50,000!

My table also happened to be next to a sponsored table, which means that a company such as Applied Materials or Bank of America sponsors a table so that teachers and community members have the opportunity to attend the event free of charge. I was next to the table that was full of teachers from the school I work at, as well as a family with two students who attend our after school program. I watched as each teacher donated what they could to our organization, and held back tears when the mother of the two students handed me a check.

It was incredible to see people from all different backgrounds offer what they could to our organization, and that moment was one of the proudest for me this year.

I thought I would share a video that a colleague of mine shot during the night, featuring some of the teachers from the school I serve at and other members of the San Jose community:

What do you want to be when you grow up?

I know it has been a long time since I've blogged, but believe me when I say "I've been busy," it's a dramatic understatement.

After spending 8 months with my 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students I have more adorable (and horrifying) anecdotes than I can possibly recount. I'd like to think I've taught them a few things, and I know they've certainly taught me a lot about things I didn't expect. I've learned west coast slang terms (I'm "hecka bougie Ms. Peters"... look it up on urbandictionary.com), I've learned how to conjure patience from thin air, but most of all I've learned the meaning of the term "unconditional love."

I love my students with all of my heart, even the crazy ones who do things that most of the people reading this would be appalled by: swearing in my face, running away from teachers, stealing things (more specifically my iPhone at the beginning of the year)... But the victories - sometimes small, sometimes larger - are more meaningful than any awards I received in college.

At the beginning of the year I asked some of the 8th graders in my after school homework center what they wanted to be when they grew up. I got one or two students to answer, but the majority of the classroom responded with "I dunno," and "I don't care." This was appalling to me -- although I didn't necessarily know what or who I wanted to be when I grew up at the age of 13, I certainly had ideas. I distinctly remember a year when I wanted to be a Rockette and a politician, and maybe a librarian on the side. Well, after working with these students day in and day out, I am proud to say that I asked this question again a few days ago and was greeted with a ginormous surprise: I now had pediatricians, lawyers, engineers, architects, business owners, chefs, and members of the special forces in the Army!

I'm going to post a few links to pages that include blog posts I've written for City Year as well as a bio from the Wheaton website that details a little more about what I'll be doing next year.

For those of you who don't know, I'm going to be joining Teach for America, an organization that is sort of similar to City Year, except that I will be a full-fledged teacher in the state of California next year. This is an exciting step for me in terms of my professional goals as well as yet another opportunity for me to effect positive social change through education (and hopefully the arts, too). This year has been an incredible experience and I can't wait to dive even further into this crazy education system.

Although I haven't found out my exact school placement yet, I know that I will be teaching Special Education, most likely in a middle school in the same area of San Jose that I'm working in this year. I'm psyched for the opportunity, and although I'll miss my students from this year I can't wait to get started on this next adventure!

Finding Inspiration in Hisory

An apology goes out to all who follow my blog for the overall sucky-ness of it this year. I'll be posting updates soon, I promise!

For right now, here's a link to my most recent blog post about what MLK Day means to me, in preparation for our "Day on, not Day off" service project on Monday:

http://cityyearsanjose.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/finding-inspiration-in-history/

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyday this week a City Year San José/Silicon Valley staff or Corps Member will share how the words and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. has impacted their life. Today, Corps Member Laura Peters reflects on a social justice project she took on while she was a college student.

My supervisor, Nadia, had invited me to stay on campus for the January break during my junior year at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. I was to assist her in planning the January freshman orientation program, as well as take on a “special project,” of which I knew very little. My only knowledge at the time was that the project would need to be finished and ready to display by Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2009.

My task was to organize the most important dates in the timeline pages into a magnificent Excel spreadsheet. Each sentence or paragraph described a defining moment in an American minority group’s history. The spreadsheet of events would eventually be printed and pasted to black paper that measured almost 100 ft long, and hung along the wall in my campus’s student center.

This was the finished Human Rights timeline that hung in the campus student center at Wheaton College.

Although at first the job seemed more like an art project than anything else, within a few hours I was completely engrossed in the information I was sorting. I learned more in a week about the social movements in our country than I had ever learned in a social studies class in high school or college.

As I sat on the floor of my campus center cutting and pasting the timeline information, professors and visitors on campus would ask me about my work. I was excited and proud to explain my project to them.

I sorted, cut, and pasted over 300 pieces of information for my timeline project. Each and every one of these events inspired me. The progress that our country has made since its birth is astounding, although we still have an enormous amount of work to do in order to ensure equality for every single person in our country.

Martin Luther King, Jr. day now has special significance to me.

For every person who believes that violence is the way to make change, there are brilliant souls like Martin Luther King, Jr. who have proved them wrong.

The project that I completed in 2009 will always be a reminder to me that a small group of individuals can make an immense impact on our society, and inspires me to follow in their footsteps, because our work is not nearly finished.

Laura Peters, Corps Member CYSJ

Ripples

I was recently asked to write a blog post for the City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley blog. Here's what I wrote:

Ripples

“Few will have the greatness to bend history; but each of us can work to change a small portion of the events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation… It is from numberless diverse acts of courage… [and]… belief that this human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

– Robert F. Kennedy, Day of Affirmation Address, University of Cape Town, South Africa

On Friday, October 1, 2010, the entire City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley site will come together for our “Bomber Dedication Ceremony.” It is a City Year tradition in which each Corps Member dedicates his/her bomber jacket to a person, idea, or cause that inspires them to serve.

When I found out about this event, I was bewildered. I was completely at a loss for words or inspiration on whom or what to dedicate my jacket. I was told that in the past, many Corps Members have dedicated their jackets to relatives, mentors, specific students, even ideas as large as the fight for social justice or the imbalanced education system.

For me, finding a specific person to dedicate something as powerful as a representation of my City Year service year is difficult. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the support of my family and friends. High school English teachers, dance teachers, and college professors inspired me to follow my dreams, no matter how lofty they were. Students from all over the country – a small New Hampshire dance studio, a charter school for at-risk students in Massachusetts, and every single student I serve at Mathson Middle School in San Jose – have fueled my passion for social justice.

came across the founding story, Ripples, in my Idealist Handbook and my bomber dedication began to form. Each corps member is allotted up to two minutes to speak, and all of the sudden this seemed impossibly short.

The past few weeks at my school have been tough. I have officially begun to feel the strain of this year of service. At the same time, I am starting to notice what I like to call “small miracles” happening on a daily basis. One of my “tough guy” tutoring students ran up to me before school started to make sure that I would be tutoring him today, and a student with exceptionally difficult behavior issues had two good days in a row. What I have realized this week is that no matter how insignificant or isolated these “ripples” may seem, they are the reason I’m here.

I’ve decided to dedicate my bomber jacket to all of the “ripples” that got me to where I am today: my family, friends, mentors, teachers, professors, school districts, and college. I am also dedicating my jacket to every “ripple” I hope to cultivate and inspire. To the idealistic leaders of the past, present, and future, I dedicate my jacket and year of service to each and every “ripple” you create.

The big, bad... middle school

Hello again!

I purposefully tried not to post for a while into my stay at the middle school. Some days have been extreme highs and others have been very low, and I was trying to wait until I had a real handle on the situation before writing about it. I've also been very, very busy!

We've officially been in the middle school for three weeks and it feels muuuch longer in some respects. Most of our days have been spent planning our after school program as well as lunch/yard duty (not the highlight of my day...) and other tasks that the school has needed help with. As of yesterday, I began what will become my more regular schedule of tutoring three students one-on-one during the second, third, and sixth periods of the day. I'm really excited to get to work so closely with a small group of students because I can already feel the relationships we're building and I'm excited to see where they go.

Our after school program has been slightly less structured this month than it will be in the following weeks and months, but I think it was a nice way to ease students into what is going to turn into a pretty rigorous after school program! We start with 1.5 hours of homework "center," where they finish their homework and can get help if needed. I worked with 5th graders for one week (they're awesome and adorable!) and 8th graders last week (a little less adorable and they have "hecka" attitude). I'm not quite sure what possessed me to do it, but I did indeed put 8th grade as my preference for the rest of the school year.

Which brings me to today. Today, we found out our specific placements in the after school programs as well as what enrichment programs we'll be leading, and what students we'll have for both of those time slots. I'm going to be an 8th grade tutor (as opposed to an 8th grade classroom leader), which I'm very excited about. The 8th graders have a lot of attitude, but they're also the ones screaming for help the most. I think the tutoring is really going to produce noticeable results.

I'm also leading a (surprise surprise!) dance enrichment! I was nervous that students wouldn't sign up for it, but it was actually one of the most popular ones! I have 18 students (7 of whom are boys!) and just had the first class meeting today. Although we didn't do too much dancing today, it was pretty hilarious to convince 10- to 14-year olds to do "Power Lunges" with me! We mostly spent time going over expectations and watching videos of different styles of dance today, and it was cool to see how excited the students got over certain things. I'm definitely looking forward to this enrichment!

I'll try to post some pictures soon... I've been pretty bad at taking them lately, so I don't have much to show you right now. I'll definitely work on it for next post, though!

Until next time...