A friend of mine from my old job asked me if I had any of the projects I had from when we worked together. When I was digging through my files I found some stuff that made me think that I really enjoyed my job facilitating tech projects with youth.
I enjoyed it a lot.
If I were stuck in some sort of impossible hypothetical where I had to work, but salary wasn’t an issue, I’d easily choose this job. But it wasn’t just the job. I also worked with some wonderful people that gave me incredibly freedoms and trusted me to such a length that I was able to put together some really entertaining and educational programs and activities for young people.
And this freedom and trust trickled down to the young people who I supervised. The big green table in the center of the tech lab was an “idea table.” The young people would bring their ideas to the table and discuss it with an adult mentor who then helped to guide them into the planning stage.
I want to build a Lego robot.
I want to make my own video game.
A group of kids had an idea for a documentary film, for example. ”I’ll give you a video camera once I see your idea on paper,” I told them. At that green table they outlined the premise, wrote interview questions and even delegated a member to go make a theme song for the movie.
This is their documentary film (and there’s a Mike Lawson cameo):
I also did some fun Photoshop projects with the young people. I’m serious…I taught 6-year-olds how to use Adobe Photoshop! Some of you grown bitches can’t figure it out, and a 1st grader made this:
Another really awesome idea that some of the kids had was to make a weekly radio show. Radio was kind of out of the question…so I taught them about podcasting! They did about 20 weeks worth of radio shows called The Guad Squad (The Club is located in Guadalupe…so Guad Squad is a cute pun). Here’s what a regular episode sounded like:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
It’s very rare when all the correct ingredients are in the pantry of your life to make such a delicious loaf of bread. In 2008-2009 I was lucky to have the right support from above and the right children below and the right attitude inside.
What about you guys?? Have you ever had a job that was perfect (except for maybe the salary or location or something) that you sometimes wish you could go back to?
I know that I said I was going to start posting my Diabetes videos on 1HappyDiabetic.com…but this one was too fun to not share here too.
When I was in Canada a few weeksago I spoke to a group of young Type 1s and we made a list of what diabetes is and what diabetes is not…and I turned it into this video:
I was five years old when I saw a man grab a young, kicking and screaming girl and drag her into a secluded gutter.
The first home that I can remember having was in an apartment complex called The Olive Tree Apartments in Anaheim, California. Next to our complex was a creepy cemented gutter thing. The photo above shows our apartments on the left and the creepy gutter thing next to the driveway (thank you Google Maps!). I’d pass this alley every day on my way to and from Dr. Jonas E. Salk elementary school. It was more common to find broken beer bottles or graffiti in the gutter than actual water. I don’t actually know what the purpose of this gutter thing was…and according to Google Maps, the gutter thing still exists. Here’s the bird’s-eye:
I’ve always been one to enjoy drama. I don’t enjoy watching people suffer, but I will admit that the turmoil that accompanies huge disasters (natural or otherwise) has always excited me. Just give me a fork after big disasters (earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorist bombings) because I can sit and just eat up the crap that the 24-hour cable news channels broadcast.
For this reason, when I told my mom that I watched a man pick up and drag this screaming girl into the creepy gutter thing, I’m certain I kind of enjoyed the panic that I saw seep into her expression. I probably enjoyed the scramble that happened when she sprinted to the door in the first heroic step toward saving this young stranger.
“What did he look like?” she asked me between her already heavy breaths. I don’t know why, in my memory, she was already out of breath since she hadn’t done much.
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Wait…how long ago was this?”
“I don’t remember,” I told her.
After the second “I don’t know” my mom pretty much had me figured out.
“I’m about to call the police because the story you just told me is very serious,” she said. ”Are you absolutely sure that what you told me is something you saw?”
And then I started editing. Since age five, I’ve been a horrible editor. Maybe it wasn’t a man. Maybe the girl wasn’t screaming. In fact, I think this entire episode might have just been a dream.
To this day, this is a Lawson Family Favorite. ”And then Michael said, ‘maybe it was just a dream.’” And everyone laughs. As Thanksgiving approaches, I’m incredibly aware of and thankful that my family is still intact…and therefore so are the stories of my youth.
I’m thankful I have a home in which I can sit and type these stories out…with ten fingers, two eyes and a brain. And I’m thankful people come to read my stories.
Another Lawson Family Favorite is about when my mother overheard me singing the schoolyard rhyme Miss Susie to myself:
Miss Susie had a steamboat
The steamboat had a bell
Miss Susie went to heaven
The steamboat went to…
Hello operator
Please give me number nine
And if you disconnect me
I’ll kick you from…
Behind the frigerator
There was a piece of glass
Miss Susie fell upon it
And broke her little…
Ask me no more questions
Tell me no more lies
Miss Susie told me all this
The day before she …
Dyed her hair all purple
Dyed her hair all green
Dyed her hair all purple,
And washed it down the stream
I wasn’t aware that my mom was listening, and I was frightened when she came up behind me and demanded to know where I learned the song. I knew the song was naughty…so I lied and said that my teacher had taught us the song.
“Oh really?” My mom questioned. ”I don’t like that song at all. I’m going to call up your teacher tomorrow and have a talk with her.”
I played hardball. ”You’re right mom, that song is bad. You should call her.”
My mom called my bluff. The next morning she pulled out her telephone book. Opened to the page with the school’s phone number. Picked up the phone.
“Wait!” I had stomach cramps. I was slightly delirious because I had stayed up all night worried that my mom would actually call the school. ”Maybe it wasn’t my teacher.”
I can now say that I know what that teacher from Freedom Writers felt like.
Today I was in the grocery store and ran into a parent that has three children that go to the Boys & Girls Club that I used to work at. Our conversation went something like this,
“Hey Gabe…good to see you.”
“Mike! Man my kids miss you.”
“I miss the kids a lot too. How is everything?”
[EDIT OUT SMALL TALK]
“Hey good to see you, tell your kids I said ‘hello.’”
“Okay. You know every time Katy Perry’s California Gurls comes on the radio in the car they all sing it and talk about how much they miss you.”
“California Gurls? Not sure if I even know that song.”
“Really? They do this dance that they said you did every time it came on.”
On Friday, May 13th I’ll be leaving my job as a youth development professional and starting a new career. I am incredibly excited to start this new chapter in my life, but I’m also a bit sad to leave a career that I’ve been pretty good at for the past ten years.
This is the fourth in a series of things that I’ll be writing called Goodbye Jam Hands. Jam hands is a term that Brian calls the young people I work with. And a 6-year-old named Jose drew the picture that accompanies these posts.
I will miss giving out Awesome Attitude Awards.
The idea is by no means original: negative behavior receives too much adult attention, so you have to start recognizing young people’s positive actions too. Sometimes it’s called “positive discipline” or “positive behavior supports” but I feel a tangent coming on, so let me just finish my story.
Each day at the Club each member of the staff has the opportunity to recognize someone for their awesome attitude. We announce the AWESOME ATTITUDE AWARDS each day at announcements. Sometimes it’s for an action (“This person helped me clean up the huge Lego mess even though he wasn’t playing with Lego”) and sometimes it’s much simpler than that (“This person walks in each day and says ‘hello’ to me”). Then every one of the people in the gym yell out “AWESOME ATTITUDE.” [Sidenote: I video taped this process and was going to YouTube it...but then realized that too often we were yelling out kid's last names and it was a little weird.]
The yelling part has kind of gotten out of hand in the past few months. All of the adult staff run over to the child and yell “AWESOME ATTITUDE” really close to the awesome-attitude-haver’s head. Normally the kid covers his/her ears and scrunches up into a little ball and falls over laughing.
And then I staple all the Awesome Attitude Awards to a bulletin board outside of my office (as shown in the photo above). The best part of this process comes when kids get picked up by their parents and they stop by the board to show them their AAA (which we now abbreviate).
I’m going to miss a few things about the AAAs when I leave here. The first is the most obvious…I’m going to miss randomly awarding mundane acts of positive behavior. But I’m really going to miss the process. I work with some really great adults that picked up this silly idea of awarding kids for saying “thank you” and “I like your new haircut” and turned it into one of the things I look forward to each day.
So I guess this post isn’t just about rewarding children for doing small positive things (which I’ll totally miss) but I’ll also miss the Awesome Attitude of all the adults that I’ve hired to work here.
On Friday, May 13th I’ll be leaving my job as a youth development professional and starting a new career. I am incredibly excited to start this new chapter in my life, but I’m also a bit sad to leave a career that I’ve been pretty good at for the past ten years.
This is the third in a series of things that I’ll be writing called Goodbye Jam Hands. Jam hands is a term that Brian calls the young people I work with. And a 6-year-old named Jose drew the picture that accompanies these posts.
I will miss the joke structure created by six-year-olds.
On Friday, May 13th I’ll be leaving my job as a youth development professional and starting a new career. I am incredibly excited to start this new chapter in my life, but I’m also a bit sad to leave a career that I’ve been pretty good at for the past ten years.
This is the second in a series of things that I’ll be writing called Goodbye Jam Hands. Jam hands is a term that Brian calls the young people I work with. And a 6-year-old named Jose drew the picture that accompanies these posts.
I will miss how excited kids get when I do really bad magic tricks.
On Friday, May 13th I’ll be leaving my job as a youth development professional and starting a new career. I am incredibly excited to start this new chapter in my life, but I’m also a bit sad to leave a career that I’ve been pretty good at for the past ten years.
This is the first in a series of things that I’ll be writing called Goodbye Jam Hands. Jam hands is a term that Brian calls the young people I work with.
I will miss pointless graffiti.
Someone wrote the word “nigger” in the concrete outside my building…see above. I don’t like the word “nigger” but I think it’s funny that a kid had a very small window of opportunity to write a message in concrete and he chose this word. Seriously, little Jeremiah Wright, you couldn’t think of any other word that might be funnier?
And I should point out that I’m not talking about gang tagging. I’m talking about real words. I’m especially fond of sentences. Things like, “XXXX sucks dick” or “XXXX is a slut.” I love when kids (usually middle-school girls) are too afraid to talk crap out in the open, but will take a sharpie to the bathroom stall. I absolutely hate cleaning up graffiti, but I don’t mind reading it.
So goodbye pointless graffiti. I hope that we can still see one another in really gross public restrooms from time-to-time.
This week I was playing little time-wasting game with the kids at work that I called “Do The RIGHT Thing.” The basics of the game are this: I ask a thought-provoking moral question or ask your opinion on a controversial issue. You can only speak if you’re holding the Right Guard deodorant stick (left over from the Passport To Manhood classes we held last month).
The questions were rather easy. If you found a wallet with $500 cash in it, would you try to return it? and If your best friend was wearing something that made her look ugly, would you tell her? That kind of stuff.
There’s no right or wrong answer. We just discussed our feelings about the questions I asked and that was that.
One of my questions was, If you could tell one lie that would make you filthy rich, would you do it?
The conversation went back and forth. Some kids say, “no way” because they would be unable to enjoy wealth based on a lie. Other kids said they’d lie and later use their newfound wealth on good. Then the Right Guard was passed to one of my favorites, Brian (who I’ve written about here) and he said, “Hannah Montana told a lie and she has made a lot of money and I think she’s very happy. So I would tell the lie to make money.”
I never realized what a shitty role model Hannah Montana is.
