Day 13: Hazardous Challenges

Learning Festival Day in Hazard, KY

I did not want to get up this morning. We just spent the last two days cycling long distances through some crazy mountainous terrain and heavy downpours. That’s not even mentioning the nasty crash I had on our day leaving Roanoke (Day 8) in which I probably fractured a rib! I was, shall we say, pooped. We had a learning festival today which started at 10, so I had no choice but to painstakingly make my way down the stairs of the Harmony House BnB to the breakfast table, all the while my knees were weak and my arms were heavy 😔. Ishaq’s bike had broken down the day before (he stopped being able to shift gears), so he had to drive two hours one way to get to the nearest bike shops in Lexington, KY. We decided he would drop all of us off at the learning festival site, the Challenger Learning Center, and then he would leave Tian to run the Machine Learning workshop alone while he got his bike fixed.

Our host Sherry cooked us a tasty casserole for breakfast, but Sarah, my bottle rockets workshop partner, thought her nut allergy was acting up even though the food didn’t have nuts. She took some Benadryl to prevent an allergic reaction, but it also made her super drowsy as a result. This all meant that Sarah was also out of the picture for bottle rockets and I would be running it solo. I was a little worried. This was going to be my first learning festival without kids from a correctional facility (we didn’t do an official bottle rockets workshop in Tazewell), and there was a variety of kids of all sorts of ages from kindergarten to 9th grade that we had to attempt to cater to in separate groups. I didn’t think our curriculum was advanced enough for the older kids, so finding out I had to run it solo all of a sudden gave me some anxiety.

I had a job to do, so I tried to set aside my worries and embrace my life philosophy of ignoring any fear and embracing adversity, or as us kids like to say, “F**k it, we ball”. I started off with the youngest group of kids and the kids progressively got older as the day went on. The first two workshops went amazingly. I was able to keep the kids engaged for the entire hour and they had a lot of fun launching the rockets. With the last two groups, however, my curriculum fears were realized. I blasted through the lesson too quickly because it was so simplified and when we all went outside to launch rockets, the kids weren’t as excited, and it seemed like a lot of them had even done bottle rockets before. In comparison, I launched my first bottle rocket a month ago! I had pretty big gaps in time between the end of my lesson and the transition time, so I initiated my last-ditch strategy of hypersocial activity. I talked with the kids about a variety of subjects, like what their aspirations and plans were, college stuff, what life was like for them, if they wanted to stay in Kentucky, etc. And it worked! My workshop may not have been engaging enough for them on its own, but hopefully they took something away from all of my talking.

Most of the other workshops ran pretty smoothly, except for 3D Printing… it’s definitely the most logistically difficult workshop to run, since Charles and Ruth run prints for all of the kids. For those that don’t know, 3D printing is a time-intensive process, and having to give 40+ kids each their own prints is super difficult. I know Charles stayed up late the night before troubleshooting the printer and the two of them spent over an hour after the last workshop ended trying to give kids their printed objects, but not everyone ended up getting their stuff. This process is still definitely a work in progress, and I hope they can find a solution to this that’ll leave everyone happy.

After all the workshops ended, we were given a tour of the Challenger Learning Center, and its actually amazing. They run simulated space missions where a classroom of kids has to work together to ensure the mission is a success, with a level of detail and complexity that mirrors a REAL space mission. I love stuff related to exploring space, so I feel a great sense of appreciation for the amount of work that the staff have put into immersing kids into a SPACE MISSION of all things. WHERE WAS THIS WHEN I WAS YOUNG????

Afterwards, they took us to an exhibit space where they had a 1/10 scale model of a rocket and a bunch of cool demos and games for kids to check out. We spent way too much time having fun in this space.

We eventually got back to the BnB where we were catered some delicious Italian food, all provided by the CLC! We all sat down at this dinner table, and I kid you not, we sat eating and chatting for five hours. The conversations just kept going and going and going and going. Those are the kind of moments I live for.

Tomorrow is my driving day, so I get more rest haha (it was genuinely one of the most stressful days of the trip for me, off-roading for over an hour in the Pacifica after avoiding a flooded road hit different). See you guys in my next blog, where we cross into Illinois and I can finally talk about a cycling day!!!!