Quique: Day 3

A description of the events I attended on Sunday:

-Equal Expectations, Equal Access: Early College Awareness workshop. A group from Lassell College presented on a program they had with a public school in downtown Boston where they would do activities to raise college awareness. I think the best part of the program wasn't necessarily raising awareness, but the fact that they would tutor kids in math and reading. I think the best way to make students want to go to college is by getting them to find learning to be something fun and useful, schools are not very good at this task and mentoring programs are the way to get this done. It was a good workshop, there were many interesting comments.

-The Privilege Line: The Privilege Line is an exercise where the students line up in a line and then step forward if they are privileged and backward otherwise with respect to a set of 60 questions read by the speaker. Depending on how far in front you are or how far back you are you can see how privileged your past life has been. Of course there are many variables in play in an exercise like this, as the questions aren't black or white, and many of them are about what you perceive, so it seems like being paranoid would make you step backward more often and being naive would make you step forward more often. The exercise was interesting, but the discussion that followed it was more interesting as we got to hear the thoughts of many of the students and why they thought they were in the back, or in the front, how we could be unaware of how privileged we have been and how we can use this information to let the generations to come all be in better situations.

-Closing Session: The closing session had three speakers. The first one talked about mentoring and since this is something I do I was very interested in his words. I think he did a good job to make mentoring sound important. The second speaker was Jarret Barrios, who was state senator of Massachusetts at some point. I liked his speech, the speech was a bit metaphysical as it was based on a book by Borges. He talked about how the analogy of the infinite library in Borges story "The Library of Babel". As a fan of Borges' short stories it was fun to listen to this speech. I thought he talked about important values in society and I liked his quote of the statue of Liberty. What I didn't like that much is how the word America was used over and over again. Personally, I like thinking more about how the world should be and not how America should be.

The third speaker was Staceyann Chin and from the get go it was clear that this wouldn't be a normal speech. The speech started slow with a couple of jokes, then all of sudden she moved away from the microphone and started giving the speech in her own voice. The speech was very powerful and very intense, it was even uncomfortable to listen to it, but one could feel her passion and her thirst for justice in the world. She recited a poem that I thought was great. It is hard to describe how powerful this performance was, it was an event I don't think I'll ever forget.

This concludes my journey through this conference. I thought the conference was great in showcasing how to raise awareness of issues, but I don't know how good it was in terms of getting action done besides raising awareness. I guess, the main thing I got out of the conference is that energy and passion for justice can motivate people to work harder for a better world.