In chapter 25 of this week’s book, Paper Bullets by Kip Fulbeck, Kip describes an episode in his life where he worked with a group of at risk children during the summer intervention group. In this chapter, Kip spends a lot of time explaining an exercise that he uses often for such groups where the participants write down the worst things and then the best things that people have are said to them. (P.247-258) I was inspired by this chapter and the exercises mentioned in it. I give them a try and did them myself. I admittedly am currently trying to sort my life out after some major changes and figured if nothing else this might be enlightening.
I am not going to share what I came up with here in part because a lot of it is stuff I can barely stand to write down for me to see. I’ve been in classes and/or programs like the program Kip described in this chapter. As a kid I had issues and was labeled “high risk”among other things. The program I participated in was not anywhere as cool as the one Kip describes in this chapter. That would’ve actually been helpful. Instead what I ended up with was yet more things to add to the bad side of the paper in the exercise that I completed last night. Supposedly this labeling was supposed to help me but it really made things worse. I know if someone had helped me and my classmates in the way that Kip describes having conducted his program it would have been a different story. While admittedly I can’t speak for all of my classmates, I know a lot of them did not go on to have successful academic careers and quite a few dropped out. We still don’t know what the point of the program I participated in was but I really hope that things have improved since I was a kid.
Refrences
Fulbeck,Kip. Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.