day 10: be my baby 🐣

Learning Festival Day in Tazewell, VA

yo yo YO!!! sarah “schmitty” schmitt is BACK again, this time from the learning festival perspective! 🧪

for our 2nd learning festival, we are near the northern virginia border in the lovely town of tazewell, specifically the main street united methodist church! since i was the driver yesterday, and was (not supposed to, at least) run my learning festival today, i had plenty of time and energy to spare to prep for a high quality blog post.

i started my day bright and early at 7:20am so that i could shower and hit the cafe across the street i had been eyeing on apple maps since the day before, “the well” coffee shop on main street. i got my 4th iced chai latte of spokes (yes, i am counting), as well as a bacon egg and cheese on an everything bagel 🥯 i brought my laptop with the intention of doing work, but my hands ended up being too greasy (and maybe i was being a little lazy, too) 🙂‍↕️ at some point, joseph pulled up and copied my exact order. i know i have good taste, but it doesn’t hurt to be a little original…🤷🏼‍♀️

around 9am, we made the treacherous, extensive journey of a few hundred feet back to the main building to start helping our teammates set up for their respective learning festival activities. for those of you who don’t know, when we were planning for spokes, we split up into 5 groups (some pairs, some not) to make 5 separate lesson plans. learning festival coordinators pick 4 of our lesson plans they want to run, and the 5th person/group ends up as “floaters” to help with overall flow. spokes 2025 lesson plans are:

• sarah/joseph: diy bottle rockets via the baking soda and vinegar reaction 🚀
• greta: states of matter, with melting ice and “oobleck” (a “non-newtonian fluid”) 🧊
• ruth/charles: 3D printing + pens 🖊️
• ramona: cryptography via simple caesar ciphers 🕵🏼‍♀️
• tian/ishaq: machine learning and AI 🤖

for this learning festival, me and joseph were the floaters. not going to lie, it was nice to be pretty much brain dead for a few hours and just have fun with the kids. they all came in around 10am, and they were of all ages, from just graduating kindergarten to entering/already being in HIGH SCHOOL!!! we usually won’t have this wide of a range, so MAJOR props to my fellow spokies for adjusting their learning festivals to fit each age group. imagine trying to teach machine learning to 6 year olds…😀

anyways, after some conversations with some of the parish adults, they eventually realize that the bottle rocket learning festival activity was in fact NOT powered by firecrackers, and are DYING to run it for the kids. since we are all for the kids, joseph and i spend the next 30 minutes scrambling our materials together (including vinegar generously donated by the church) in order to run the rockets during lunch.

lunch (also generously provided by the church) consisted of corn dogs, watermelon, carrots and ranch, chips, s’mores, and cookies!!! 🌭🍉 plus asian food(?) for our resident vegan and non-pork eaters tian, ishaq, and ruth, respectively. during the 2nd half of lunch, we took each of the 4 age groups out in shifts to watch the bottle rockets. i’m SO glad we were able to do so—the excitement and smiles on some of these kids’ faces were SO worth it. truly a reminder of why we do what we do!!! 💗

once the final kids left around 3:30pm, it was time to clean and CRASH. i hadn’t biked the ~70 mile route the day before, and didn’t fully run my learning festival today, but i was still EXHAUSTED. even after (kinda) repacking the car and hosing down the now very colorful tarp with greta from her states of matter learning festival, the day was STILL not done. to keep a long story short, i made a quick, non-serious visit to the hospital the night before to get a prescription for some steroids i might need in the future (in case i get more sick than i already am, because asthma is forever the bane of my existence and destroyer of my happiness), and i still needed to pick the pills up at the pharmacy. so, i decided to tag along with and help joseph on his laundromat run 🧺

1 bottle of prednisone and detergent, 68 quarters, and 3 bags of laundry later, greta, ruth, and ramona arrive with cheese bread from the italian place a block (ok, maybe a block is generous, another few hundred feet?) away. ramona had come earlier and commandeered 1 of my quarters (consensually) for a piece of gum, but she helped put laundry (which she calls “laudry”) in bags, so we’re even. eventually, the group makes it over to the ice cream joint attached to the italian place, and we all get a sweet treat of some kind, whether it be ice cream or float, kindly paid for by our learning festival main point of contact, theresa! after hearing a few of us left our towels at another host’s place, she also bought new towels for ALL of us. so sweet 🥹💗

when we return, tian is taking a nap, but the energy is HIGH in the kitchen as charles and ishaq are preparing to cook all of the breakfast food provided by the church for our stay. pancake batter is being mixed, biscuits are in the oven, and bacon and eggs are on the way 🥞🥓🍳 i added some extra hershey’s chocolate to my raspberry “rocky road” ice cream (that doesn’t contain nuts!), and got started on my blog. as of writing these sentences, half the group is on a sugar high from the sweet treats; there’s music and singing coming from the cooks hard at work in the kitchen; route planning, blogging, and 3D printing is occurring all at once in the dining room; some (one is) are snoozing upstairs in sleeping bags on the floor; most (everyone else) are eating in some way shape or form. THIS is what spokes is all about!!! 🥰

after washing a mountain of dishes to a spotify playlist ishaq searched up called “songs white girls get turnt to” (as a white girl, it was quite alright), ruth dragged everyone into the living room to finally watch a movie, which we had been discussing doing for a few days now. it wasn’t until i sat down in a chair that i realized we we’re watching a horror movie.

 i.

 HATE. 

horror movies. 

but, for the sake of team bonding, i decided to stick around to watch “barbarian,” even if i watched 90% of it with my hands covering my eyes and ears as much as possible, and my body half turned away from the screen. after it ended, ishaq started ranting about the genre of horror, symbolism, etc., but my elbows were sore from cowering for 2 hours straight, and i was just glad it was over. he tried (for the 2nd time since staying in tazewell) to jumpscare me, and (for the 2nd time) i hit back. not sorry. i made ruth follow me to the bathroom that was 10 feet away from where we were all sleeping because i was scared of being alone. 2/10, not doing this again out of my own freewill. sorry guys. musical next time? 🎶

i brushed my teeth, got some of the last bits of sugar out of my system by carrying ruth around and (simultaneously) attacking ishaq, sorted some of my laundry, and FINALLY laid down. we’ve only been on spokes for about a week and a half, but it’s already felt like a month. a single day feels like a few days all wrapped into one. it feels like spokes will last forever, but even between the early rises, sore legs, itchy bug bites, hilly rides, and exhausting learning festivals…i wish it did. 

on that note, i am finishing up this blog the next morning, and i really got to get ready to bike to breaks. see y’all next time for…(checking the spreadsheet)…our rest day in bowling green, ky! 💚

yours truly,

“schmitty”

P.S. to respond to ramona’s slightly antagonistic statement at the end of her last blog (the one right before this one), i finished this (my day 10 blog post) at 9:25am on day 11, so i would say i was pretty timely this time around :)) love u ramona tho!