In plain sight

I've needed a few days before I could write about my last AMP'D meeting. I always thought I "knew" some things. I know how devastating poverty is. I know the depth of racism in this country and I know that schools are in what Bruns calls a casual collapse. I know the lives of children and youth in urban contexts like Rochester is difficult in the extreme. Truth is, I didn't know at all.

Poverty, physical and emotional abuse, terminal illness, rape, abortion, abandonment, fear, murder, hunger...and all in the past six months. And all before the age of 18. And to be successful, amazing, smart, determined, loving, political, dedicated, artistic, savvy young people in spite of devastating circumstances that would crumble most adults I know. I'm sure I'm sounding naive. It's not like I haven't had my own share of trauma. Alcoholic parents, emotional abuse, a child with severe disabilities...and more I'd rather not say. It's not the same. I'm white, middle class, and educated. And I'm 51.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here. I return to outrage that things like this happen to youth in this world. These kids are under the radar at school because they are successful in playing the game for the most part. There is no one to help them. How has this happened? What on earth are we doing?

Podcast hell

So I finally got the AMP'D podcast up and running...why does Vivian say this is so easy? Maybe I'm just dense, but it took forever to figure out. The kids did a beautiful job of recording the first episode. It's a wonderful discussion of what it's like growing up Black in Rochester. Anyway, first we had to figure out how to convert a wav file to something we could upload into GarageBand and/or iTunes, and then edit. Once we figured that out, we then had to figure out how to upload it onto a podcast hosting site. We tried gcast to no avail. We found podbean which also has video capability so signed up. But the problem of getting our file into the right format remained. Podbean takes zip files so...eureka! All this has taken much longer than expected. Check it out now that we finally did it. Subscribe, comment, become our friend!