March Goal Post: 3 am Edition

I just gave blood, and I crashed as soon as I got home, so this will be a GP written at 3 am when I happened to wake up and can hopefully stay awake. During this month, I hope to interview the ESOL director at Albany High School and compare their ESOL programs to ours at Guilderland. Albany High School recieves many more immigrants and refugees than we do, and just from looking at their website, you can already see that more programs exist. Additionally, Albany High School is a very, very different school as compared to Guilderland, so being able to interview here would expand my perspective about the immigration and refugee influx in the Capital District, especially due to Albany High being in the center of the capital. The coolest thing was probably seeing that they had translated their ESOL page into different languages in order to cater to that direct audience; Guilderland's programs aren't really advertised that well.

The second and third thing I hope to do this month is discover my own ancestry at the Guilderland Public Library and prep for the library discussion that Febronia is organizing. One of the advisers gave me the idea of deepening my search for my own connections to immigration by looking at the ancestral records available at the library, and I'm really excited to see what I could find. Already I know some stories that have been passed down through my family (as seen in the earlier post "My History"), but that's for only one branch of my family. I'm a mutt made of many different countries, so I would like to figure out where I could have also come from. Now the third thing. As the symposium looms over my head, I decided to participate in a pre-discussion at the library where I would hopefully be able to practice speaking to a large audience that is not my peers. Right now, the tentative plan is to have individual discussions and then have a panel with all of the participating Emc2 students; for this, I would have to prepare my jumbled assortment of research and ideas into a final question, a final idea. All of this pieces are finally going to have to become a picture. Despite that being a little scary, I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. My idea for a theme right now is "a sense of belonging", but I may discover something new in the month to come. We'll just have to see.