ENGAGING THE DESIRE TO LEARN MORE BY HANNAH FERUS

Scientific magazines, documentaries, and science fiction have all been a weekly, if not daily, part of my life for as long as I can remember. Even then, I wasn’t sure until my second semester at college whether I was going to be able to pursue a STEM based degree. The self-doubt and uncertainty for if I was good enough to even try was off put in the end by the simple desire to learn more. And as I learn more about different forms of education, and have been working more and more with youth in the community, it is a topic that seems to come up weekly.

My motivation for moving to Montana and working through Montana Campus Compact was in part to learn if I wanted to pursue the path of becoming a teacher. Part of my service here in Butte, MT is to assist with an after school science program at M. Leary Elementary School. This program has offered me the insight and experience I sought, but it also has emphasized to me the importance of supporting the curiosity of the youth in all communities and a teacher/academic mentor’s ability to direct innate human curiosity into a desire to learn.

Human curiosity expresses itself in the students on a weekly basis. From going off-script while working with snap circuit boards to produce the same result in both more complicated or simpler ways, to making homemade thermometers and working with them to figure out if warmth or cold (and how to achieve those conditions to test) will make the red liquid move up or down the straw. The reasoning for why these experiments work the way they do is sometimes obvious for those of us who are older and know at least basic examples of liquid expansion (water to ice) or principles of force and air pressure (ever squeezed a juice pouch when you were younger to get the juice up the straw?). And even if in a group you are not able to fully explain these principles to every student, I have seen how even experiencing these phenomena in an academic setting and encouraging questions is enough to begin developing a desire to learn more.

It’s not learning the answers to every question that makes you learn the most in life, or become a brilliant academic, and yet the very principle of having the predetermined answer to every question is what we are increasingly judging students by. The desire to learn is a skill, a mindset that transfers across all subjects in life. So through personal, and now observation based, experience, I am left wondering what indeed are the best ways to approach the education of our country’s youth?

I believe that through the services we provide as AmeriCorps leaders that we can create a variety of safe and engaging spaces for students within a range of topics, and that this space should be not only to aid them in succeeding in the district and federally determined academic standards of education. Rather, if we make sure to implement the value of learning and provide experiences for them to develop a desire to learn more about any subject then we are better preparing them for any array of futures. 

Every set of community, school, and class dynamics will differ as greatly as an individual’s experiences and perspectives in life. There is no silver bullet to education, and any number of factors need to be considered when planning a course let alone a restructuring of the entire system. Besides social, political, and structural changes which would allow for the shifting of our entire education system. I have come to view our work as AmeriCorps members to be a very important one. The work we do is not always groundbreaking, but, as has been highlighted in recent weeks by various news articles and speakers at recent conferences, taking a year or two out of our life to aid dozens if not hundreds of students who cross through the threshold wherever we serve is something that does not go unnoticed in the larger scale of things. This leads me to two additional thoughts about our work in AmeriCorps. One, that the pure number of hours and range of locations that members serve at is something that in and of itself shows the breadth of possible good done by another under-paid and under-utilized sector of our society and economy. And two, that it is a grand shame that it is necessary for a small sub-sector of the government to attempt to remedy the larger inequities and failings of the government at large to support not just the broad sector of ‘social services’ but specifically the education systems which are the backbone to every aspect of our society since it is how we learn about the world, our country, our community, ourselves, and how to best support the very places we live. 

A desire to learn is innate in every human when we are born; we are blank slates, sponges, who observe and absorb everything in our environment. And yet we have managed to progress to a society where this is not acknowledged, where the growth of all our children is not emphasized. And furthermore, where knowledge is taken for granted and not emphasized at the level of the general population.

At a time when misinformation and snap decisions can have lasting impacts on larger communities than ever before, my service through AmeriCorps has shown me the importance of giving aid at an individual level, and how even students who are considered smart and don’t have issues at school aren’t given the space to develop further skills and instead stagnate. It is fairly well known that schools in this country are constrained by having to focus on the lowest performing students, at the consequence of having their schools lose funding and potentially being shut down. The education focused groups within AmeriCorps can work to relieve this pressure on districts by working in classrooms, creating and working at after school programs, but the numbers don’t add up to these efforts being the solution to the problem.

Thus the question remains, through all of our experiences serving in AmeriCorps, how can we take what we learn, what we see, and what local people and educators tell us and culminate it into real change? Is there, or could there be, a format for this work and experience to mean more? What will it take for our country and society to put the education, and therein personal and economic well being, of her citizens first?

STARTING OVER BY ASHLEY HETTLER

Poster above my desk

Hanging above my desk is a poster that reads, “No hate, No fear, Refugees are welcome here”. Every time I look at it, I hear chanting in the streets and see thousands of people swarming Washington D.C., with their signs waving. Living in D.C. for 6 years was eye-opening. I was no stranger to protests, politics, and people marching for what they believe in. It’s inspiring, and exhausting. By late 2017, I knew it was time for me to leave D.C. and pursue a field I was passionate about. I had wanted to work for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) since graduating college, and Campus Compact had one opening to serve as a VISTA. I eagerly applied, had a few interviews, and 5 months later I found myself driving cross country with my mom and aunt to Missoula, Montana, to start a new career and a new life. Little did I know that I wouldn’t be the only one starting over.

Glacier National Park (in September!)

Settling into Montana was fast and furious. It was unlike anything I’ve experienced before. The climate is really dry (hallelujah!), I live within a few hours of 2 incredible National Parks, my car got frozen shut in the midst of winter, and walking down the street one day, I had a man look at me, tip his cowboy hat, and say “Howdy!”. I had never seen snow-capped mountains before, and I’m still not entirely sure what kombucha is, or why lots of Montanans love it. I shake my head sometimes and smile at how far outside of my comfort zone I am, and how good that feels.

I started my AmeriCorps VISTA service in late July when the IRC office was in the middle of a refugee “surge”. In this case, we had about 70 individuals come to Missoula over the span of 3 months. I was thrown into the craziness immediately. Between attending meetings, learning the abbreviations and lingo associated with refugee resettlement, and getting comfortable showing up at a client’s house and telling a family - that doesn’t speak English - to get in my car to go to an appointment - it all had its challenges.

Serving at the IRC has taught me more than I hoped for. In the first few months of service, I drove a mom and her 3 daughters to a school enrollment meeting. Towards the end of the meeting, the mom found out that public school was free for all of her kids, and she started to cry. She couldn’t believe it. A young man from Congo asked me if I was married, and was shocked (his jaw actually dropped) to find out that I was 25, not married, and didn’t have kids. I drove another man to his job interview, and he was the only black man in the store. Customers stared at him the whole time. If I thought that moving to Montana was a culture shock for me, it is nothing compared to the transition refugees face when they land in Missoula wearing flip flops in the dead of winter.

My backyard on Christmas Day

The IRC is doing amazing work, both domestically and internationally. They help people, who were forced from their homes due to violence and threats, to safety in the United States. Missoula has been consistently active in bringing refugees to Montana, and helping them become involved in the community.

Because of this year, I now belong to the AmeriCorps community, the IRC organization, and the city of Missoula, and for that, I am eternally grateful. AmeriCorps was my excuse to leave D.C., but it also became the very reason to stay in Montana and continue this service.

AN EXTROVERT ALONE: MUSINGS ON SOLITUDE BY ALEXIS BURTON

I moved to Montana with the understanding that I was going to live in a small town I had never heard of, in a house that stands out among the crowd. I did not come here with the understanding that to live alone meant I was alone. No big deal, I decided, I get along with myself just fine. But when I arrived, the worries startled me. A whole year alone? No roommates, no friends, no one to greet when I come home except my plants. What would I do when the aloneness got real?

The Mothership, a.k.a my house

What I didn’t plan for was the aloneness of having made an abrupt decision to change my life and rip myself away from the comfortable space I created in my college town. Or having to grieve the death of a loved one alone without having the finances to make it back for her funeral. Or what it would be like to come home to an empty house, alone, day after day, for months on end. Or to get sick and have the flu alone. Or that if I wanted to socialize, I’d have to plan for time differences to Skype the ones I left behind or else make a plan in advance to visit other AmeriCorps members. Or that when I did finally make it back to the Pacific Northwest for holidays, the little world I was part of continued largely unchanged without me.

Somewhere around the turn of fall into winter I decided to welcome the darkness that I found myself spiraling into, and made huge intentions to be like a tree this season. They look dead above ground, but beneath the soil they are digging their roots down further into the land, finding hard-to-reach nutrients and becoming perpetually prepared to support themselves during the springtime explosion back into life. I spent some hours pondering on this notion, on how to dig deep to support my outward growth when the sun returned.

It’s been mentioned before that self-care is imperative, and particularly so when you’ve uprooted your life (pardon the pun) to try something so far out of your comfort zone you don’t even know how to prepare. I had all sorts of self-care practices already in place, but I wasn’t ready for the darkness of the sky to chase me indoors and keep me there all winter long. I wasn’t ready for a bone-chilling cold to suck all my energy away, to be worried about frostbite or the reality that all the trees around my rental property would drop their leaves and that with them, my last perceived connection to privacy in my home would fade away. How do you prepare your mind for such a shift? I felt stuck in my heart that I couldn’t dance with my reflection in the window at night, couldn’t run barefoot in soft summer grass, couldn’t even mark the change of season by measuring the persistence of my favorite weather occurrence (rain), and I couldn't watch the sun rise or set or even really see it for very long.

The Willow that inspires my musings. 

I greet her every day, “Hello, Mama”

So how do you turn in and grow deep like the roots of a tree? How do you welcome the darkness and its regularly accompanying broody-moodiness? I learned that all it takes is an intentional perspective shift. I wanted to be productive, even after being shoved inside by Montana winter's apparent nonchalance towards my well-being. I sat and meditated, and came up with this: All you need is an open heart. I shifted the way my mind saw the daylight, I returned to my favorite self-care practice, beginning my mornings with gratitude and thanking my body for waking to each new day. I decided to quit watching Netflix and start getting creative. I used my weekends to make gorgeous breakfasts for one, take long walks, and dig my car out of the snow with a happy heart, instead of a begrudging one. When I saw less than an hour of daylight each week day, I became my own sun. I took active steps to shift my headspace into one that was conducive to actually being content with myself. All of a sudden, it was a breakthrough. I craved being alone. I craved opening up my front door and welcoming myself home, I began to see the intricate beauties of winter instead of getting stuck on how much it sucks to be cold. I began embracing the cold, and got excited for how much of this temperature change I could handle.

As my spirits were lifting, a Rupi Kaur quote came across my pathway, “Loneliness is a sign that you are in desperate need of yourself.” I screamed with glee, “YES THAT’S WHAT I LEARNED!” and the craving to solitude was all the more strong. When I go anywhere now for extended periods of time, I build in space for solitude. I look for a place to retreat, rejuvenate, rest, recluse. And with that new understanding of clarity, my heart is wider open than I have ever experienced before, and the lessons I unlock within myself are bright and bold.

What I didn’t plan for sparked some of the greatest points of self-development and self-reliance that I never asked for but received willingly. Recently I happened upon another quote that sums up these learnings into words I hadn’t found yet for myself. “Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.” (Paul Tillich)

Stuck my phone in a tree stump to take this selfie at

 Kootenai Falls on a solo weekend adventure. 

I’m grateful that I dug into myself and sent my roots to solidify my centeredness. I’m grateful that I live alone and far away from everyone I love and everyone I’ve met and networked with through AmeriCorps. Sure, it would be fabulous to live in the city or at least closer to “civilization”, but serving this town and community has been a gift. Heck, living alone has been a gift. So here I am, a declared extrovert learning to lean in to solitude, heart open and connecting deeply.

Life sure does happen when we step outside our comfort zones, doesn't it?