Craft Conspiring

Saturday, September 27, 2014

Know Your City (& It's People)

A Goal.  Colorado Springs.  Also use all the periods.  We moved here last month.  Our furniture just moved last week.  Danny has been stationed here on and off for the last four years.  I was living in Denver.  Pikes Peak creates weather with gusto, sunlight, and like, its really tall presence.  Garden of the Gods is made of red sandstone and some great Mother Nature imagination.  There are fires.  And firearms.  And Space Command and other important governmental agencies, including four military bases that employ lots of uniformed commandos.  People come and go and leave rented houses with weeds growing in the sidewalk cracks.  There are a lot of churches.  Aside from chain restaurants, there is a great taco joint, Palmer Park hikes, local breweries, a bar to watch football pre-cable installation, the Air and Space Museum, a fly fishing shop, and a couple backroads that will propel us most quickly into the mountains.

I tutor a young, second grade lass who is filled with energy and life.  He is beautiful and is 'behind' in his reading because he can't read Lego magazines as an academic resource, and generally wants to talk about using rockets to win his cross country races instead of telling me his site words.  I don't blame him.  Also, second grade cross country?

A principle of emersion and empathy in the classroom is to become one with the community.  To know it's resources, it's politics, priorities.  Why the haves have and the have-nots do not.  What sports teams are of interest, and the prevalence of immigration and domestic abuse.  Also, what makes people smile or fear, but mainly laugh.  Here's to that new journey in this place.