After a crazy night of line dancing down at the Piggly Wiggly, we all really enjoyed being able to sleep in this morning. Today was a chill, relaxing day. I woke up early and read on the dock for a few hours and then walked around the Lander's property with Min and Jiani. After lunch a group of us went out to Medoc Mountain State Park, where we hiked the orange circle trail. The "summit" was a bit of a let-down, but it was an enjoyable experience just the same. We hiked five to six miles in about two hours, told some really bad jokes, and played a few challenging rounds of 20 questions on the ride home. When we got back Group 2 hooked us up with some amazing mac'n'cheese for dinner. Group 2 seemed to think there was something wrong with it, calling the cheese "explosive" and "adhesive," but it tasted just fine by me. After dinner, we celebrated Rachel's birthday and watched Waiting for Superman, which we compared with our experiences thus far at GCP. We all agreed that this documentary sheds light on the disgrace that is currently the American Public School System. Students should have the right to a good education. Something as important as education should not be granted by luck. The documentary also left out information about charter schools, skewing the image of these schools to make them seem ideal, but, as we have observed at GCP, there are still flaws in the system. Charter schools can kick out students who are not performing to their standards, so of course they have 90% graduation rates. It's all about semantics and manipulating numbers. As they talked about in the movie, it's still mostly about the adults. If charter schools truly cared about the students they would not kick them out for behavioral issues or low grades. Just because they are giving up on less children doesn't make it the ideal system of education. Tomorrow we get to go back to KIPP to paint the bathrooms and design a bulletin board (amongst other things). The students won't be there because of MLK Day, but it will still be interesting to get to talk with the teachers while the students aren't there.
- Anne
P.S. Sorry about the lack of paragraphs :)
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