Introductions

Today I was facebook chatting with a friend from my alma mater. He’s interested in the work that I do and the organization that I work with and always asks me how its going. During this conversation, though, he had a brilliant idea: start a blog. Every day I come home from work full of stories- about my students, my lessons, and the inside jokes from the office. Usually I just bore my roommates with such stories, but hardly ever remember them day to day to tell the other important people in my life. That coupled with the fact that I’ve been listening to books on tape so much during my commute that I’ve started to narrate my own life as though my life is a book on tape, made the blog a perfect idea.

As I mentioned, I work for a college access program and I’m based in an urban high school. I think I’ll keep most everything and everyone anonymous for now, until I’m sure that I can’t get in huge amounts of trouble for naming anything. But, here are the basics: The school has a few thousand students- most of the students are minorities, specifically Hmong. All of my students are low income and most will be the first members of their family to go to college.

Our office is located in the library in a room about the size of my mom’s closet (which is actually a pretty nice size). One of our walls is a counter with a large open “hole” that faces into the library. There is a metal grate that rolls up and down, which is what makes me feel like I’m always behind the counter at a concession stand (any guesses how I got to the name of this blog?). Every once in a while I think it would be amusing to give away hot dogs to the students in the library, it would feel appropriate.