What a surreal day. At 12:55 this afternoon (mountain time), I was parking my car next to an elementary school playground. I had just come from King Soopers with packs of cut fruit and vegetables, and I sat in my car for about 10 minutes to eat as much as I could before I had to go inside the school for a volunteer project. At that time, the very earliest reports were coming out regarding the latest mass shooting at a school two thousand miles away, and I listened to the radio until the timer shut it off so that it didn't run down my battery. That early on, the reporters were calm, saying that the video they watched was difficult to interpret, but the people walking in view of the cameras were moving slowly and deliberately, like the active situation was over. The reporters said they saw one or two people on stretchers being wheeled to an ambulance (they weren't sure whether it was two different people or the same loop of video shown twice). They made it sound like it wasn't very bad, or at least on the surface it didn't seem to be. When the radio shut off, I didn't turn it back on. I whispered a tiny plea to the inside of my car for it to be okay, and I went into the elementary school.
The volunteer project was amazing. The school was a STEM focused elementary, and the project was letting the kids build their own bristle bots. These are things that can be bought complete and ready to go from a commercial website, but there were electrical engineers with connections to this school who decided it would be far more meaningful to these children to make them for themselves. They got a large case of neon plastic toothbrushes donated to them, and they spent several hundred dollars on tiny electric motors, watch batteries, and little clamps to hold the batteries in place. Our job was to help the kids solder the clamps to the motors, insert the batteries and test the motor, then help them attach the motors to the toothbrushes, and clip off the excess plastic. I helped two first grade boys and two second grade girls solder the motors and test them with batteries. The boys were rather timid. They were afraid of the heat of the soldering iron, and they seemed to have a little difficulty with the process. The girls were on it, especially the second one. Not only did she have significantly more confidence with the project, she named the tools with minimal prompts (like "do you know what this is?" "a soldering iron.") Other people in my brokerage who were helping kids noticed similar patterns. It made me have a burst of confidence for the future of girls in science.
The project itself was a whole lot of fun, teaching the kids about how easy it could be to assemble a mini-robot of their very own. Our brokerage made a donation of funds as wells as time, to cover more than a third of the cost of the supplies. This is something that comes off the top of all of our deals, for this very purpose. I have said it before, and I'll say it again, this is why I chose this brokerage to work with. Our volunteer t-shirts read: "Headwaters Realty: Where giving back begins." We mean it.
Halfway through the project, in between the first grade group and the second grade, I checked my phone. The news alert by then stepped up the reporting of the school shooting. I think at that point it said that there were multiple fatalities, but it was unknown the full extent of what happened. My heart dropped. It was difficult to separate the completely different worlds in my head. I rapidly went from enjoying the unbridled joy of six and seven year olds successfully racing toothbrush-head robots to looking at them as vulnerable babies who have to grow up in a world entirely removed from the one I grew up in. What the hell are we doing to our children? Why are we stressing them out and not taking care of their physical and mental health? Is it the demands of education? Is it the political or economic climate? Is it technology? Is it food? I don't know what makes them snap. It has to stop. It just has to god damned stop. Let children be children. Let them be safe. This is unacceptable.
I'm watching the reports on tv now, while I'm deciding which photos of the happy part of my day I should post. These things should not be happening at the same time.
No comments:
Post a Comment