As I stepped into my LAST first day of school, I rewind to my first day ever in high school, and realized how everything has occurred in a blink of an eye. Sometimes, when people realize they have only two more months to live, or know they have to quit their jobs, maybe move to another city, or are one step to graduating from High School, many of us have that desire to leave a footprint wherever we are. I began my first day of school knowing that this semester, the biggest thing I wanted to accomplish, was the only and most important task I have in BlendZ: Habla Roosevelt. The reason I enjoy having tasks like these ones—organizing the social responsibility aspect of my company—is because it’s one of the few tasks that end up being truly fulfilling. Yes, it might be exciting to see how much money we’ve made, or be creative with a really cool ad that EVERYONE will see, but it's priceless to know that you’ve made an impact in your community and see a positive change in other people’s lives, knowing that we work hard at BlendZ to be able to run a program like Habla Roosevelt. Habla Roosevelt consists of providing English classes to the workers’ children in FDR. We are in charge of hiring a well-prepared and experienced teacher to provide the best English education to our students, as well as FDR student volunteers to help along the way. Seems like an easy job, but when we are talking about committing to every Saturday, it’s hard to find the perfect match. Plus, trying to plan what the best way to teach a kid a language is for the first time, can get challenging because the majority of us mostly grew up speaking English and don't know otherwise. On the other hand, as challenging as it can be, it’s also the most interested and most real-life it can get in the IA. How? Let's see... Last week, Carolina, Corey and I, actually conducted an interview to a possible teacher candidate. In my entire life, I have only been to two interviews: the one for entering the IA and another for an internship. The difference with then and now, is that I was at the other end of the table. I had my computer open, I was reading off questions and typing some notes that came along the conversation. Our minds had to be working 100mph, trying to think what the smartest, appropriate, and necessary thing to ask was.
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Do you remember that time of the year when your wallet gets annoyingly heavy and unable to close because of all the receipts you forgot to throw away? Or when the couch in your bedroom is no longer visible because all the clothes that are piled up on it? Or your drawers being impossible to open because of so much clutter? As hard as it is for me to accept that I may be a little bit messy, I have to. And yes, what I described below was--sadly--actually me. My friends and family know that I can keep my locker tighty at school, but when it comes to my room, it's another world of grunginess at times. And as ironic as this may sound, I'm actually not a big fan of having a messy room even though people say that it may lead to more creativity and ideas. In fact, it leaves me a little bit restless and doesn't allow me to work calmly when it is in that state. So, for this last week of vacations that I had left, I started catching up with some school work--as many students might be doing right this second--but there was something that wasn't allowing this to happen. To be honest, I think it might have been the pile of old notebooks I had been meaning to organize and throw away months ago, and they were starting to stare freakishly at me. I knew then, that it was time to make a quick clean-up session in my bedroom. After a thorough clean up in my disorganized bedroom, it does feel quite satisfying, but doing the job is actually a tough job for me. I have always had some trouble getting rid of my belongings, be it a very special necklace, or a pen, I always tend to think that I might need it and I shouldn't be getting rid of it. Last year, when we began using street clothes to school, I promised myself that if I didn't use a piece of clothing for that entire semester, I would give it away at the end of the year because I probably wasn't ever going to use. So, I started with that, and then I decided to apply the same rule to anything else in my room: pens, pencils, notebooks, decorations, etc! It was a time for absolute cleanliness. And even though I'm now regreting some of the things I got rid of, I MAY be fine. I'll try to not think about it...
The good thing is, my drawers are now able to open and close without a problem, I can now sit on my desk without finding a random sock on it, and my wallet no longer weighs as much as I do. ッ I'm glad I did this total clean-up in my room because just as people detox every once in a while, cleaning and debugging your room are also necessary sometimes to have an organized and mess-free lifestyle that will allow you to do anything at any time of the day. They say that the things that happen in your childhood scar you for life. It’s true. But your past is your past and the only thing remaining is learning what you did right and wrong, and moving on. In “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” Charlie probably faces every possible abuse a teenager can face: bullying, manipulation, isolation and peer pressure. And the reason behind him being so vulnerable was because of his past. At the start of his freshmen year, Charlie was completely in a downfall; Charlie felt lost and out of place because of a childhood accident: her aunt had died in a car accident and he felt 100% guilty. He was probably about five years old when that occurred. I feel that at such a young age, understanding the death of a loved one is the hardest thing to get. You don’t really understand what truly happened and most importantly why. Why something that horrible and traumatic had to happen to her, and why did it have to affect you too, in some way. I could relate to this. But every one deals with these things differently, and for Charlie, this really scarred him for life. One of the biggest lessons I learned from this book was overcoming your past by learning from the mistakes you made, but realizing that any of that will be impossible without the right people beside you. This might sound cheesy and perhaps cliché, but the book says it all. When Charlie was a freshman, he had just lost his best friend and was completely alone. Then, he found new friends that turned his life around, and even though they might have been three years apart, they connected because they understood and supported each other no matter what. At times we may feel meaningless, misunderstood and alone but… “There are people who have been through the same things as you, danced to the same sappy music as you, and driven 100mph down the same road as you”. About a week ago I watched a small documentary on POPINNOVATORS. This time, it was about a TV personality, fashion designer, best-selling author, and lifestyle expert: Lauren Conrad. She began as a reality show star and little by little stepped outside that face and turned into a successful business woman. At one point in her career she searched for a more fulfilling job, apart from what she did everyday in her office. After many successes she began doing a lot of charity work; she travelled to Africa to learn more about the world and realized that there are countless number of talented people who just needed some tools to take their products to another level. She visited a community of women that rely solely on the products they craft such as baskets, women accessories, house decorations, clothing, etc. The problem with this was that it wasn't a sustainable business because they didn't have a large group of customers. So, taking it to another level meant online shopping, something that also happened to be a boom in the Internet at the time. Now, these women could keep doing what they did but in a more sustainable manner, selling all over the US. After days of planning, she created a website called www.thelittlemarket.com. As I watched this documentary I realized that Habla BlendZ was all about that, too. Our workers don't see Habla BlendZ as charity, something that could be easily mistaken with since we are all used to seeing that in school many times. In fact, our workers were seeking the opportunity to give their kids a better education and more opportunities in life. Plus, they also saw it as an opportunity for them as parents to learn some English basics through what their children learned with us. We aren't giving them money. We aren't giving them food. It's nothing materialistic. Habla blendZ is all about opportunity, the opportunity to speak a language that is so necessary in this 21st century.
One week prior to stepping out of the stressful and sleepless environment that school had become, everyone was already dreaming of a relaxing and fun environment where we would all be able to chill, stop following a schedule, and sleep for hours. I, too, wanted that, however, I had an idea of a summer vacation attached to text books and books, and stuck to my computer the entire two months because of how much homework I had.
live a life with no stress at all. And most importantly, I would say, is using that “free time” to do things you cannot do during school. But, I thought about this while I was up in Ecuador and I realized that it’s impossible—especially in your senior year—to forget about school-related responsibilities, because even though we are lazy to complete those, it has to be done. So, I debated between two possibilities: doing things we don’t do at all while we are in school vs. doing them differently than we would during it.
This is for real. I turned on my computer after about probably two weeks some days ago and it felt rewarding. Those weeks I had spent reading books, magazines, being outdoors taking pictures and overall trying to do everything I kind of always did but outdoors. In fact, I originally wrote half of this blog when I was at the beach and finished it at home on a small notebook where I used to write down my blogs instead of typing them.
✎✎✎ Until now, I’m enjoying this approach and I’ll try to keep up with it, as long as it doesn’t stop me from working efficiently and responsibly on everything I have to get done! After two years of focusing on your weaknesses for improvement, and pushing your strengths to the limit, it was time to see how far I had grown. If I compared the growth of my abilities and skills before entering the IA and now, the growth was quite minimum before than it has been in the last two years. But, even though growth has also been apparent in only 5 months this semester, I’ve always believed I have space for improvement. And now, after a semester filled with autonomy and opportunity to show your potential, I realized that taking initiative was still one of my weaknesses. Asking where you can help out or volunteering for something is not the complete definition of initiative. For me, initiative is realizing there's a problem on your own and trying to solve it. Initiative is coming up with new ideas to improve our business and keep growing. This semester, as we started BlendZ and went through many pivots, I became the Director of Social Responsibility, which entailed to find somewhere to donate the money generated from BlendZ. The role seemed easy at the beginning, but it was clearly not. One of my biggest learnings this semester has been to have a balance between excitement and being skeptical about my ideas and decisions we make as a team. Throughout the entire semester we’ve had endless ideas for our
For a long period of time during BlendZ, I was stuck with this portion of the company, which is why most of my feedback was lacking initiative. There was little improvement seen from the social responsibility throughout the semseter, and I truly wish I had taken more time to be more creative with this.
to be more present in class discussions; I began to have a voice and involvement in class, something my peers and I agreed on fully now that the semester is coming to an end.
This semester, I have accomplished two major goals: make my voice be heard and reading. I became more comfortable and more confident in myself during class discussions. And in terms of reading, I finally managed to 1) find a book I REALLY enjoyed and 2) actually managing to finish it. It’s true, there is ALWAYS time to read, you just need to find it—and the only way to do so is finding a book you find interesting and pleasurable. I have a clear memory of doing movement composition in Middle School, the most disdained P.E. unit of all times. We had to create our own choreography from scratch, being creative and having a somewhat high level of coordination with all your peers—something hard to do considering that not everyone had a good sense of dancing skills. A group usually consisted on a “pro” dancer, the responsible one, and the one who just did what they were told. And because of this, efficiency was something everyone prayed to have. For an entire semester I have been planning and coming up with ideas to become a socially responsible business and just in the last minute, we have come up with what I think is the key to a problems: uniting our community by language—but there will be more on this later. Almost five days ago, our Kickstarter video about or company to get funded for a future BlendZ expansion, was finished and we were EAGER to release it to the public and start getting funded. We wanted people to start watching it and we wanted to see those dollars coming in for our most treasured and dream smoothie truck to have on campus. However, we were still missing something; we were missing the most important aspect of our business—the W H Y we are doing this, the P U R P O S E. After so much research and endless interviews we did to our workers, the most protruding skill workers wanted for them and their kids were English classes, which makes sense. They spend every day of their lives in an English-speaking environment and they barely know the basics. We always understood the need, but our reaction was always: “it’s not FEASIBLE.” At the time it was a perfect new idea because we found a way to make it feasible, but it was something we planned in less than 45 minutes. I felt like we were compromising. Just like how we compromised for the creativity of putting together a choreography for our movement composition, we were doing this with the social responsibility for BlendZ. But, as lucky as we can be, the idea was one of the simplest but greatest ideas we have had for our social responsibility. What bothered me was the quickness in which this was determined after so much working at the end. And apart from that, we didn’t take time to look at the pros and cons and what needed to happen next. This is the next part of the learning I’ve done this weekend: sometimes, excitement should be your enemy and skepticism your best friend. Whenever we have a new idea and it seems like is going to work, we all get extremely excited. This is great for the most part, but it keeps us away from thinking on any loopholes the idea might have. Because of this, sometimes skepticism should be our best friend and remember to keep them close.
Doing this at the last minute is not always a negative thing, but there has to be time put in after that to clearly think things through. I feel like this was my job that I failed to do because of how excited I was. It kept me from really thinking how can things be done better or even WHAT has to be done before the end of the semester? This is the perfect example of being playful but serious at the same time when the job has to be done. And finally, if this were a movement composition, I would feel—with no doubt—that with more determination the final product will be a top-notch aspect for our business. For BlendZ, we have always felt we were a bigger group than we needed to complete our tasks as a business. Because of this, we decided to split up on every sale and so two groups would be in charge of two different sales. This, of course, included everything from the marketing, product, finance, logistics and social media. It was WEDNESDAY at 8pm and TEAM 2 was ready for some FRIENDLY COMPETITION. We had the pressure of beating the other team and at the same time producing the highest amount of profit because we need it. We are in a point in our busines when we need to try EVERYTHING. Working with less people, have a different store layout, testing on different weathers, making deliveries, etc. And for this sale, our biggest challenge was dealing with the weather. To be completely honest, I was feeling kind of competitive that morning. Yes, I definitely wanted to beat the other team, but I also wanted to prove that we CAN be efficient and make things work SMOOTHLY. Unfortunately, the weather played against us that day. After so many beautiful, sunny days in Lima, we had a typical gray Lima sky with a horrid weather of non-stop rain.
On a more positive note, we had an incredibly successful theme/event going on. It is NO SHAVE NOVEMBER, or how we call it in BlendZ: NO SHAVE NOBLENDZER. We were looking for the guys with the coolest mustache or beard or the girl with the longest hair, and the winner would get a FREE smoothie! Our event was our client magnet. I’m telling you, believe or not, people have an innate competitive side and it was evident during our lunch sale. Especially the girls, they were eager to find the girl with the longest hair and try to beat each other by calling their friends that had a chance to win the free smoothie. With this, I realized the power of marketing. You need to target a specific audience and in a smart way. I feel like we are still figuring out who our audience is and specifically who we want to target and ways to do so. Its important to know and study our customer segments in order to put an action plan together on how we will target them. Overall, the friendly competition we have at BlendZ gives all of us an intrinsic motivation to work harder, be more organized and twice as efficient. At the end of the day, we all have a same purpose: see the success of our business. And with some fun competition we have are able to have that push we needed all along to get things done.
G L O W S T I C K S.They need to B R E A K before they S H I N E. A few days ago, we created a pre-mortem about BlendZ, and in the process, we found a problem in our system. Sometimes, a bump in the road to creating a business and succeeding doesn't always mean lack of capital; sometimes it means we have lost our purpose, one of the most important aspects of a business. We weren't motivated to raise money and we knew it was because we had 0 idea where our money was really going. And just like a glowstick, we 'broke.' Especially me, I felt this was a failure in my role as director for social responsibility. For many weeks, I have been asking for more work because I felt my job was done. In fact, we all did. But our original purpose was to BLEND our community and that wasn't happening in any way. We needed to stop. Think. Reflect. PIVOT. Money is only one part of the service BlendZ offers our school community, only 50%. However, the other half is a service that will blend our community and get to know our workers, other students, teachers, etc. Once we had that settled, we were ready to plan our events and make it happen. But there was something missing. This is when I realized as well that this is something we had to do months ago, when we first started planning BlendZ's social responsibility.
Once again, there was a big bump on the road to success. We had to fail to learn, and we had to break before we shined. We are in the process of overcoming this, adapting to new ideas, applying what we learned, and getting things done. How many times have we seen students yearning for more content-based learning or demanding a change in their education system? How many times have we seen students have a real passion for learning? As we began the IA, many people underestimated what we did just because our approach to education was distinctive and peculiar. Many times, it was associated to being the easy way out, something we constantly fighted to contradict. However, this was a fight that, at least I, realized that it wasn't worth fighting for because I didn't have to prove anyone else the value I saw in my learning. For a year and a half, everyone in the IA agreed that we all had that passion for learning that many other students didn't seem to have. About two days ago, I came to the realization that we truly did. We found ourselves--13 IA students--talking about how we could change our system, make our learning more effective and be more motivated to bring our business forward. We realized there was a PROBLEM and we found a SOLUTION. Our problem began when we didn't take advantage of the AUTONOMY that we had asked for about a month ago. We saw a lack of initiative and motivation and we weren't working towards the success of our business. We focused on short-term goals rather than long-term goals. Essential things that needed to be worked on, were ignored or not taking as a priority. But, even if we did focus on these things, many of them were tasks we could finish at home and use our class time for more effective learning that would help us--students--to reach our highest academic potential. This, however, sometimes meant focusing on more content-based learning. Experiential learning occured through our experience with BlendZ, but our time is VALUABLE and there were better ways to take advantage of it during class. We asked for more content we asked to learn more skills and we will. We brainstormed things we are interested in learning and how to learn it and now we are in the process of doing so. We have already had a Socratic Seminar and a fish bowl, were we have discussed real-world issues through articles and songs.
We found a problem in our system and tried filling in those empty spaces in our education. We proved everyone and ourselves that even though we learn more effectively through experience, we also crave content. Of course, we will never forget the roots of hands-on learning and how that can be implemented in our content-based learning experiences. |
AuthorStudent at Colegio Roosevelt in Lima, Peru. Archives
June 2015
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