January, 2020 -- A Fresh Start

Welcome back to the Westside!

Thank you for visiting this blog and checking out what our organization did here at West leadership Academy in the month of December. 

Before I get into the month's activities, I just want to give a shout out to those of you who keep supporting and sending us positive vibes to this classroom from wherever you are. It is truly appreciated and it is something we do not take for granted. That being said let’s get to work.

In today’s blog, you are going to be reading about the lesson we did before break, our Christmas dinner party at La Alma rec center, and last but not least the preparation and overall process For the final our Mentor Leadership Team and I conducted with our students.

#1 -- The Brain:

The unit revolves around healthy relationships specifically how to build one, how to maintain one, and to identify what we as individuals can do to make sure we are in healthy relationships with anyone we encounter. In December, we touched upon the lesson on the brain. The lesson on the brain revolved around three essential questions. 

Number one: What is the anatomy of the brain?
Number two: How does the brain work?
Number three: Why is the teenage brain hardwired for risk and reward?

The concept is basically this: 

Why are teenagers so moody all the time? Nine times out of 10, it is because of how the brain is essentially hardwired for teenagers to release hormones from the pituitary gland inside of the brain. As adults, for the most part, we tend to use the pre-frontal cortex of the brain, which allows adults to rationalize risk versus reward, and allows them to put deeper thought before making an emotional decision. Unfortunately for teenagers, the brain synapses (lines of communication inside the brain) are still developing and have not reached the prefrontal cortex, which leads teenagers to use their emotional amygdala. By using the amygdala teenagers react quickly from the emotional part of their brain without running the decision by the more rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. This leads teenagers to want to take risky behaviors for quick dopamine rewards. Furthermore, teenagers also miss read facial expressions and at times have a hard time identifying the correct emotion that other people might be feeling due to their actions or situations. This miscommunication in teenagers' brains plus interactions with other people and their own individual reactions to situations at times equal teenagers being in relationships with teachers friends family members that might not be healthy. I could go on forever and ever explaining this but by having students be aware of this and coaching them to slow down and rationalize things before making a decision, I and my team hope to have students be prepped to make healthy decisions to be in healthy relationships.

Is it fair to say that every single teenager reaction emotionally 100% of the time? No, it is not. Every interaction or situation that I encounter myself with a student, I approach with compassion and understanding and most importantly, being able to place myself in their shoes. However, there will be times where a student might not be in the right state of mind (sad, angry, overwhelmed) when they come into my class, at which point I can talk to them if they would like to and assess the situation, coach them up, and hopefully positively further the teacher/student relationship that my mentor and leadership team and I are building with the students.

#2: Our Christmas Party at La Alma Recreation Center

Thanks to Coach Dino Abeyta, our family advocate, we’ve have been able to build a great partnership with La Alma Rec Center in order to bring our kids back into their neighborhood recreation centers. Our goal with these dinners is to break bread with our students and have our students break bread with each other. It is our belief that once we break down those barriers of miscommunication and assumptions, our students can come together, break bread together, learn from one another, share resources with one another, and at the end of the day, build healthy relationships with one another. This was the second dinner that we coordinated with the rec center and our students. Ideally, our goal is to have all of our students come to our dinners with their families, and get to know me and coach Dino, seeing as we work with them on a daily basis. I wholeheartedly believe that if our parents buy into what the organization is doing, and see how much dedication and sacrifice my mentor leadership team and I put into this organization for their students, we can be successful at anything we put our minds to. West has always been known for our open-hearted community, and this organization is exactly what that is. Below are photos of my mentor leadership team and a few of my other reliable students working hard for their fellow students. Check them out!

#3: The Final Interview/Oral Examination:

When I took over the program, I envisioned a classroom where our students were coaching each other up, pushing each other to higher limits, and ultimately, it all rubbed off and we would do the right thing for each other. One of the other goals that I had is to prepare our students for real-life situations. In my personal opinion, one of the most important events that anyone will experience is an interview. That’s why my final in the class was an oral examination of the content throughout the semester. It was an opportunity for our students to do three things:

1. Interview Etiquette: Prepare for an interview and know how to act in an interview (body language, handshakes, eye contact)
2. Content knowledge: Provide me with a foundation of knowledge that they have gained throughout the semester.
3. Coaching Eachother: Critiquing each other on how to respond to questions, body language, and scripting responses for the questions I was going to ask. 

I conducted over 100 interviews in three days. I walked away from the experience really optimistic but also very tired as asking the exact same questions over and over again can take a toll on you.

I walked away feeling as if 75% of our students have bought into what we are doing here in the class. That’s not the worst however it is very clear to me that we have work to do in terms of closing the gap of our students feeling as if they are growing to be responsible adults. This falls solely on me and I do not take it for granted. I was surprised, in a good way, of how our students prepared for the exam. The hallways were packed with students' mock-interviewing in each other, students critiquing each other on responses, and students working on shaking hands with the interviewer. Again, the goal always has been for our students to be able to lean on one another when the time comes. And what better way to do that than to prepare for this interview and prove their instructor wrong. 

I am extremely proud of all of my students who came in and interviewed. Major shout out to all of them!

As I reflected over the past two weeks on vacation, I realized that my students, my mentor leadership team, and myself are all on a journey together. Not to keep beating the same drum, but the work we do here together is crucial for them to be able to grow up to be responsible adults who contribute something back to their communities one day. With a profound renewed sense of urgency and a reinvigorated mindset, this semester will be the semester where our students will make the biggest growth from last year to this year. We have the right people working with me and on the metaphorical bus or boat, whichever you prefer. Where ever we may go, I am very confident that we will be able to pull ourselves together, help one another out, and build each other up to provide a service to our students and our community. So if I were you, I would continue to read these blogs, because what we have planned for the next five months is going to be big. 

Thank you once again for reading the blog, thank you once again for supporting West Leadership Academy, and most importantly thank you for believing in what we are doing. 

Happy reading y’all. 

Cowboys, out