The City of Brotherly Love

Today was the first full day that we had in Philadelphia at Institute.

Induction had been lot of orientation to Baltimore, paperwork, and socials to meet the other corps members. As busy as it was, it was really nothing compared to Institute. This is where the rubber meets the road, and it's intense. In the next five weeks, we're expected to become effective beginning teachers, and in one week, we're all going to get our own summer school students. To prepare us, we need to be finished with breakfast, have our lunch packed, and be on the buses by 6:30AM. We're at our schools around 7AM, and from there it's session after session, lesson after lesson (both receiving from our advisors and delivering to the students) until 4:30PM. 

Then, at night, we have additional sessions and meetings, with constant deadlines every day. We've been told we don't finish until 9-10:30PM sometimes. Take that, I-bankers. There's dinner and a workout if we're lucky somewhere in there as well. I forgot to mention that we're in professional attire in the 90+ degree Philadelphia summer heat. I'm just glad my school has AC, because there are some school groups that don't have any. 

It's very intense and high-speed, but it's actually fun. There's a sense of urgency everywhere that I haven't seen in many other places. People are excited and nervous all at the same time; proud and apprehensive about what we're doing also.

It's a strange sight when I walk out of the dining hall with lunch in the morning and see 600+ professionally dressed women and men walking together toward a fleet of yellow school buses, matching black lunch boxes over their shoulders. There's an incredible sense of mission, like we're an army (or corps... go figure) that's marching off to fight for something. I feel like I'm part of something so much bigger than myself, and it's a great feeling to know I'm here to learn, work hard, and throw myself into the fight for educational equity.

As kind of a side note since it's been on my mind for a while: There are so many things that we've discussed over the last week at Induction, and that we will be learning here at Institute that I came across during UniCamp. Every day, I'm shocked by how much of this I have a background in because of that experience, and I know that I'm always going to have a special place in my heart for camp. I know I have to keep the passion I had for UniCamp, and pour it into what I'm doing now. Here we go... what an adventure!