The Snow

Today at Winooski High School, I again found myself in the Community Based Learning Class. The students are currently working on blogging about their experience in attempting to change facets of their school, whether it be the cafeteria food or building access. The class has moved on to less of a lecture/teaching based class, and is instead focused more on independent work with guidance from the teachers. That is what I find myself doing during my time in the class, discussing general concepts with the students and providing both grammatical and general feedback on their blog entries.
Today I was working with one student that was blogging about his experience with being unable to access the building before seven thirty AM. There are no bus services for the students, so they either must be driven, or walk to school. His situation is such that he must walk to school each day. This is not as much a problem in the warmer weather, where it may only be a six or seven minute walk, but in the frigid cold, it can take him upwards of fifteen minutes simply to get to the school. And then he tends to be stuck waiting for another fifteen minutes until the doors open and he can come inside. This issue is obviously very important to him, and it can been seen un how seriously he takes all aspects of this assignment, including the blog.
What struck me the most was that last winter was his first experience with the concept of winter. Winooski has a very large refugee population, such that the student body of the high school is very diverse, and come from all around the world. Many have grown up in Africa or South Asia, and have not experienced such cold temperatures. This was interesting to me, as having grown up with cold winters my whole life, I was intrigued by the concept of first experiencing winter. He told me that he liked the cold, but was not a huge fan of the snow. He told me a great deal about his experience with the cold and the school, and it was nice to just sit and chat with a student that had such a different background than my own. Though there was no great depth to the conversation, it was still a chance to form a connection. You don't start off your first conversation with a person by discussing politics, you talk about things like the weather. That is where it begins, and you can go from there. It was especially nice for me, as I haven't gotten the chance to connect with many of the students at Winooski, so to have this experience helped me learn that connections need not always be deep to have great meaning, but that many things can have some form of impact.