From the beautiful beaches of La Jolla to the ghetto Inner city of San Diego.

Over the course of the rest of this quarter, these three things will be consuming my life.
100 hours of Internship at an off campus middle school/high school charter school.
40 hours of practicum at an off campus high school.
__ hours of work at an off campus elementary school.
All of these three schools that I'm going to be spending time at all lie within a 5 mile radius from each other, and all are about 20 miles away from the beautiful campus of UCSD.
I am going from the beautiful beaches of La Jolla to the ghetto Inner city of San Diego.
I am going from the place of rich college students (rich enough to afford a college education at least) to the place where a college education seems distant.
I am going from a place of rich whites and asians to a place of povertized latinos and african-americans.
I am going to a place where I am so uncomfortable, so out of place, and so different.
And yet... I am happy.

These past two weeks working under a School Psychologist, I've learned a lot about kids from the inner city. I've been in the worst of the worst classes, the classes where you teach 8th graders 4th grade material (not an exaggeration). I've been to a class where people are put there because of their behavioral problems. I've seen class clowns equivalent to the ones that I spent my time with in High School times 20. I've had to counsel kids about why they drew murderous pictures, and even those who wrote about murderous intents in their journals.
But even in the midst of all this, I enjoy it. I enjoy spending time with these attention hungry kids. I enjoy talking with them with their problems, about things that they are going through. These kids are definitely a handful when they go off their mood swings. But when teachers, deans, even my supervisor, couldn't get this student named Wilmer to talk, he trusted me. He was able to talk to me, and even though it was just a couple sentences, and he was definitely holding back, I knew he trusted me.
These kids need so much, and still we (as a society) tend to neglect these students who have so much potential. But they need more than education, they need love. And every time I set foot into the campus, I say a quick silent prayer, a prayer that goes something like this:
"dear Lord, give me the strength to show Your Love on this campus"
And it pushes me through, the long 6 hours zooms by and it feels like I've just been there for a little over an hour.
I just found out this last Tuesday that since the beginning of the school year, 10 teachers have left the school. 4 of those teachers came and left one particular class. 10 TEACHERS! WHAT. THE. FREAK. Nobody ever said teaching was going to be easy, and especially at this school. But how could they do that? When I heard that I was so saddened. I couldn't believe my ears... My dreams and aspirations to become a teacher grew even bigger, I want to touch the lives of kids like these, I want to show them that there are teachers who care...
There is so much to share about internship, but I'm going to give it a rest for a while. I'll share more in the weeks to come.