Last Thursday and Friday I got to chaperone the annual CSF college visitation trip. Our destinations were UC Davis and UC Berkeley. What was especially fun about this trip was that Bree and several of her friends came, so I knew most of the kids on the trip.
Our Davis tour was beautiful. Great weather, amazing facilities, lovely campus. The kids were a bit skittish, though, because the primary mode of transportation for students was cycling, and man, those cyclists were aggressive! I heard the kids more than a few times mutter that they were nervous about crossing the roads for fear of being run down.
Highlights of the campus visit for me were getting to meet up for lunch with my former student, Brittany (one of my all-time favs!), hanging out with some great work friends (Mary, Brook, and Amy), and getting to see the student protest regarding UC tuition hikes.
The next day, our Berkeley leg of the journey, was not quite as much fun. The campus was great, and I actually ran into four or five former students, which was an unexpected surprise, but the weather was much more uncooperative. It was gray and cloudy at first, but in the middle of the tour, we got caught in an absolute deluge of rain. Our group of forty-eight kids was sharing approximately twenty umbrellas, so most of us got soaked to the bone. Also, as might be expected, the UC tuition protest had an even stronger base in Berkeley, so some of the areas we might have seen on the tour were closed off to us, as there was a sit-in in progress and several buildings closed due to pulled fire alarms. Nevertheless, it was exciting to have the students see real political activism in progress.
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Hopefully such programs inspire more kids to consider college instead of just deciding that "they're not good enough". Or perhaps inspires them to do better in school knowing what awaits them around the corner!
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