Back to Reality!

Today marks our first day of class back at the University of Illinois! After being so busy the first half of break, it’s been nice to sit back, relax, and have my mother do my laundry (or is that just me...?).

Although it’s nice to be back on campus, I can’t help but miss our time in Minneapolis. Even though we weren’t in class, we learned so much during our trip! I couldn’t help but think about everything we’d been able to discover and how much I wanted to share that knowledge with my fellow future educators. Between playing with the young children at Sharing and Caring Hands to tutoring students as old as 21 at Opportunity High School, I was able to learn so much about working with students in an urban environment.

We spent our last day again at Opportunity High School, which gave us the excellent  opportunity (see what I did there?) to see classes outside of our content areas. I was able to observe Health and ESL. I found it interesting how different ESL was in this environment since many of the students had received very little schooling previously and were not very familiar with American idioms. For example, I struggled to explain terms like “marriage” and “button”...try thinking about how you would do it!

After helping out at lunch and taking pictures with the high school staff, we hit the road for Chicago. Although the trip was seven hours, it passed surprisingly quickly thanks to some podcasts and well-timed jam sessions. I think we’ve all agreed that despite this we will be flying to our Spring Break destination next year.

I can honestly say this trip has trumped any Spring Break I’ve gone on previously (and that includes a trip to Florida!). I had a wonderful time belting Call Me Maybe, working with students unique from what we’re used to in Chicago Public Schools, going on late-night hot tub runs, learning from some truly amazing professionals and philanthropists, and making my friends from UNITE into some of my favorite people on campus. I’m extremely proud of what everyone was able to do both in planning and engaging throughout this trip. Even days later, reliving our trip is putting me in an amazing mood!

So thanks for checking out our posts about our trip! Hopefully you enjoyed reading about it even 1/10th the amount we enjoyed living it. Thanks to everyone for their help throughout our journey and we’ll see you next year!

And by next year, I mean we’ll go back to regular blogging for awhile now. We have a lot of exciting things planned over the next few months, so be sure to check back regularly!

-Sarah