#slurs as a result. i hope. at least around me they did lmfao

[lacett]

when i was 21-22, in a last ditch effort to do something with my college career, i joined a mentorship program where college students get trained to teach middle schoolers how to build a mobile game with block-based coding (as an early exposure to coding and CS).

i hadn’t interacted with anyone younger than me in a long time (i’m usually the youngest in my family), and i had 0 teaching experience so it was…interesting and way out of my comfort zone. also some of the kids were kinda mean lol. but my kids really warmed up to me and were really good kids.

we found common ground in talking about anime and video games while we worked (and they were really good at catching onto the material and were very smart and creative), but they also felt comfortable enough to talk to me about their school lives or family lives, some of which were not very great. and it made me very sad, but i was also honored that they trusted me as an adult to confide in. i just wanted to make sure they had a good time in the couple hours we spent after school.

my co-mentor and i mentioned being in band/orchestra when we were in middle school, and two of our students invited us to see them perform at a school concert and meet their parents. it was nice, and i think they were more excited for us to watch them play than they were for their parents lmao.

at the end of the program, various schools in the district showcased each group of kids’ apps and judged them for prizes. i watched my kids in a fortnite dance-off? with a competing school who they’d never met before. my kids were super proud of the game they made and were really hyped for the judging. they said, “if we win, you have to play fortnite with us” (i’ve never played fortnite but i said yes).

we didn’t win, sadly, but the kids were relatively good-natured about it ahaha (“bro this is rigged”), but i think they had fun just being there. one of the kids (an 8th grader who had been bullied/ostracized in school) texted me afterwards: “you were the best person in the entire school.”

idk, i think that experience (that i almost didn’t commit to bc Anxiety) made a huge impact on my life. i did a few more mentorship sessions for the program before i graduated college. i don’t think i had the same connection that i did with my first group of kids, like the girl telling me she had to miss class because she had a counseling appointment for her depression or the 8th grader who just wanted someone to talk about his video game interests with since he didn’t have many friends at school. they asked me a lot about college, what i did there, what i was planning to do afterwards (i didn’t know at the time bc i was just struggling to pass my classes lmao). the girl asked me for a letter of recommendation to get into the art program at her high school (we bonded over digital art a lot). the 8th grader went on to volunteer with the mentorship program the next year since he was disappointed the high schools didn’t have it.

anyway, it blows my mind that they’re probably toward the end of high school now? i don’t remember/can’t conceptualize the passage of time. i like to think i made some small impact on these kids’ middle school careers, not so much on the technical front but just by having an adult mentor figure that actually listened to them. i think it’s the one experience i’m proudest of. working corporate could never lmao