Senior Projects

I left off on Tuesday, and now my week is Wednesday through Friday. Every day is the same. Except on Thursdays, some of the students get to go to Straubs Grocery store. They get to bag groceries and check out people’s groceries. I also help out in the kitchen to make the hot lunches daily. The students prepare it, too, which is pretty cool. Friday was a fun day because the students got to listen to high school musicals during SMZ, and in their classrooms, they got to play games that they don’t usually get to do every day. That was the week at Promise Christian Academy! I will display some photos of the kids I was with. I got permission from the school and the parents. 

Hey guys! So, as you know, I finished at Crisis Nursery last week. I am now at promise. If you’re unfamiliar with the school, it is a private co-ed special education Christian School in town and Country. I started Monday with my mentor, Mrs. Tyler, and met some Visitation Academy students volunteering. I began with SMZ, known as the Sensory Motor zone, where students work out to loosen their muscles. Then we went into the OT room with Mrs. Tyler and different students, played with Thera Putty, and worked on their writing skills. After noon, the students were working on their play for the end of the year. My day starts at eight and ends at 3. Tuesday is the same schedule every day because they want to keep the students on a strict routine. Every once in a while, they change it. Come back for part two of my week, Wednesday through Friday.!

On Wednesday, Blas and I went to Lambert to see the tower. The tower is the tallest part of the airport, with glass windows all around it. Its job is to direct traffic at the airport so that planes can land on the runway or land and get to their gate. The tower’s airspace is 3,000 feet to the ground. Something different between Lambert and Spirit was that Lambert had a map of the airport and showed where the planes were on the ground so that in case of bad weather, they could still know where the planes were, but Spirit did not have this. If Spirit has bad weather, they need to have the pilot tell the controllers where they are constantly so that they can control them to where they should be. Lambert has mostly commercial planes landing and a couple of business jets, but Spirit only has business jets and smaller planes. Even though Spirit doesn’t have commercial planes, they were surprisingly still busier than Lambert at times.

On Monday and Tuesday, Blas and I went to Gateway Tracon. A Tracon is a place where people direct plane traffic. Gateway Tracon’s airspace is 3,000 feet to 15,000 feet with an 80-mile radius, and the middle is Lambert. The people at Gateway Tracon control any planes that are in this area. You go in to direct the planes in a very dark room with a screen that shows you where the planes are, how fast they go, their height, and what plane they are. Gateway Tracon’s airspace is separated into multiple parts, so one person is not controlling everything. There is low arrival and departure, which both control 3,000 to 6,000 feet, and high arrival and departure, which control 6,000 to 15,000 feet. Each plane needs 1,000 feet of vertical or 3 miles of horizontal separation. On Tuesday, Blas and I both got to do a simulation where we had to tell a trainer what to do with the planes which was really fun.

Thursday, 5/9:

Like every Thursday, I was stationed at the Key Bistro until about 2:00. We have some new policies like guests have to be seated by a waiter or greeter rather than seating themselves. We also no longer allow Express Cafe customers to sit in the restaurant portion. This made it a lot easier to manage and we also had a full staff so that helped as well. There were a lot of people that were all very nice and I got a lot of steps in! I skipped breakfast and drank a Celsius so I felt really jittery, but luckily I got my free meal, which was a delicious (it was a chicken sandwich with avocado, lettuce, onion, tomato, and bacon and French fries). I also got the film camera photos from prom back today and they are so cute! After that, I met with Hana to go over the slideshow of the accessibility features. After that, I was free until 4:30 so I just took a bit of a rest and walked around the galleries. Then I worked with Maggie and Lydia at our table for the concert. It was very fun because we had a wheel you could spin for prizes if you filled out a survey. I also saw two people that some of you may remember (Dr. Urbano, you definitely will). So, I had gone inside to re-fill my water and as I am walking back out through the grand hall, I pass, none other than Mr. and Mrs. Voekel (Ryan and Elliot’s mom and dad). I was like “Oh my god! Mrs. Voekel!” but literally if I hadn’t turned my head at that exact moment I would have totally missed them! After that, Mrs. Voekel texted my mom saying it was so good to see me and that I looked so beautiful, which was very sweet to hear. After my mom picked me up, we took a trip down memory lane. We drove down Fiddle Creek Road and out to St. Albans. It was honestly so cathartic and ever since we moved locations, we barely even go down Fiddle Creek anymore. It’s just crazy to think that that era of our lives and of TFS is just over now.

Friday, 5/10:

Friday, I worked HED (History Exploration Day) for kids. I helped hand out raffle tickets, which were for winning a free book (there were two books, but it was the same book). The book was by this mother and daughter about perserverance and they were our guest readers, after Julie read a book on soccer and on riding a ferris wheel. Then I just did crow control for our face painting table. Then I sat at the touch table with Elena where we mostly just chatted. I love Elena and I am so sad she is leaving in June because she is such a sweetheart. The rest of my shift was spent cutting out school busses, which was bussin’ and then just being a general way finder and gallery attendant. After work Friday, my mom and I are going to this vintage clothing night market held by May’s Place at the City Foundry. It’s all outdoors and there are lots of different local vendors there, which is really cool. I was originally going to try to work Mondays at May’s Place, but since I was already exceeding my hours requirement, I decided just to let me have that day to myself, which Dr. Hurwitz is so right, we do NEED to implement a four day work week! Speaking of Dr. Hurwitz, I got a really nice email from him on this day. I really miss him and not getting to be in his class, but I also really enjoy Mr. Kickham as well. It’s cool though that we are able to stay in touch some.

*The turnout was crazy. It was an R&B tribute concert by Anita Jackson, her brother, and the rest of their band.

Things are starting to slow down and I’m wrapping up a lot of the big projects that needed to be done by the end of the quarter. I’ve been working from home most of the week so it’s been pretty uninteresting, though I will be out working at one of the properties over the weekend which will be a nice change of pace.

So, since I wrote a blog post early on about my overall thoughts and feelings about the senior project experience, I thought it may be cool to share one about how they have changed or new information since we are all in the last stages of our projects.

I think the biggest thing I have realized from being on the senior project is how ready I am to be done with highschool and I don’t mean this in a rude way of like “I’m done with this place and I am never coming back!” I am just ready for something else. I’m tired. I’m too old for this (highschool) anymore. And maybe “too old” isn’t even the right phrase, I mean I am 17, I’m graduating early, but I just don’t belong in a highschool setting anymore. I think I’ve gotten too good at the challenges highschool presents whether it’s academically, athletically, or socially. It’s not challenging enough for me anymore. In my mind I am already at that graduation ceremony– I’ve been there for months. I’m ready for something different. And all that means is that you guys, as teachers and administrators, have done your job. If I felt unprepared or like I wanted to keep doing highschool then I wouldn’t have gotten the full lesson highschool is supposed to teach or fully absorbed my preparation for the real world. You can’t stay in highschool forever in a literal sense, and I don’t want to be one of those adults who just talks about their “glory days” and has never let anything from highschool go. Your life doesn’t stop after highschool, it doesn’t stop after college, it doesn’t stop once your 30 or 40 or 50 or even older. Life goes on and each decade is another new era (like the Taylor Swift’s eras tour! I am so sorry I made this joke like this is such a dumb joke) and you have got to keep going and changing. That doesn’t mean you have to forget about the past completely, it just means there’s not a point of dwelling on the past and wishing you could go back to a different period of your life.

I also just think that often times the adults who act like highschool was the best time of their life are in a way lying. I would say overall my highschool experience has been really good and way above average in terms of my personal feelings, but also above average from all the different things I have gotten to try. I don’t think at a big school I would have gotten as good of academic classes or to play multiple sports or the chance to come out of my shell and be more outgoing. But I mean, I don’t know this for sure and sometimes I do wonder how things would have shaken out had I gone to a different highschool. One thing is for sure though, I wouldn’t be sitting in the grand hall of the Missouri History Museum writing this post, I wouldn’t be working 30 hours a week for the museum, meeting high profile humanities people, or offered a part time job for pay while I go to college. But even within my really good highschool experience I have had moments where I just feel really awful, including the beginning of senior year from like August until I started feeling better again in November. I think the people who are still stuck in their highshool mindset neglect to mention or have purposely blocked out completely the memories of how awful highschool can feel sometimes. One of my favorite things about “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (“BTVS”) is that yes, Buffy has to fight all these actual demons, but at the same time she has to have this struggle with the regular metaphorical demons of highschool all while having to conceal this really insane secret (that she is the slayer) that causes a ton of inner turmoil. And yeah, I haven’t fought vampires or saved the world in highschool, but I have had to slay plenty of my own personal demons. And in a way, I think that’s what highshool or even just life is about– it’s about encountering these demons or really awful situations, and coming to terms with them, and figuring out someway to fight them off, and they may not go away completely, but there’s things you can do to not stay so attached to them.

It’s very cheesy and I feel like such a little pretentious snot writing this, but I feel like I have become a woman while on this project. Not like in a creepy or weird sense, but in that I am more of an adult now then I was weeks ago. I understand more about the adult world and how it works. I’ve learned that it’s not this mysterious and scary thing like the boogeyman. It’s sort of like highschool, except you don’t have to sit at a desk all day (well I guess depending on your job you may have to sit at a desk all day). And I am just excited to keep experience this new part of my life for the next few years during college, and then see what happens after that, which is something that I think is really beautiful and I am fully confident in myself that I am capable of taking the full plunge into adulthood because I have already gone into the shallow end, and even though it might be scary at times I am gonna be perfectly alright.

I apologize for the length of this and I will be seriously trying to limit myself in these last few posts I have to do, but I will say, this stuff does come from my own head and heart and I think that should account for something in these matters.

This week I spent my time finishing my angular website. Through these days I learned about angular and the way different files connect through templates. Later, I continued to work with angular and attempted adding my Flask folder to my angular website. This ended up becoming a bigger struggle than I expected as I had to use the terminal and install the correct modules to my python environment in the corresponding directory.

After I finished my website on Thursday the lead developer from the QAC application team had to get a new employee up to speed on what their application and let me sit in on their meeting. Here I got a more thorough overview of what their application does. It was very informative and he gave me more details about what specific code they use and more on their architecture. This I found to be invaluable information for me as it gave me insight into two different projects and how they both work allowing me the ability to compare them side by side.

Yesterday Robyn had a docket with about 7 or 8 cases for the morning, so I sat in on all of them. There was also a detention hearing that was supposed to turn into a motion hearing but the defense attorney that was supposed to give the motion had someone else fill in for him. The judge was pretty irritated by this, seeing as the motion was for a change of judge, so he didn’t even hear the motion and moved onto the detention hearing. After court, we had watched body cam footage for a trial on Tuesday. The footage ended up taking about 4 hours to get through, but it was really interesting seeing how the cops dealt with the parents and their 3 month old baby. This will be really helpful because the parents have denied everything that happened that night but when their lawyers show them the footage they’ll likely just consent. This would be ideal because if trial does go on, it’ll last for hours.

WARNING!!!! This post exceeds my word limit and I am sorry! I am not trying to be a rebel, but this will be the only time this happens, again. I could split this into two parts, but I also work Saturday, so I was going to post three times anyway this week most likely and four seems excessive, even for my standards. Either way I slice it, one big post or a bunch of little ones I am going to take up space on this blog, and I am sorry if it is inconvenient, but I am trying my best and these past two days have been very interesting!

So, we are all nearing the end of our time on our senior project and I am near the end of my time at the History Museum, but potentially it won’t come to an end (I am putting this here at the beginning and I am not gonna tell you what I mean until the end of this post. It’s called foreshadowing and a literary device! As always, if you don’t know what it is, look it up!). I also work Saturday this week for our kids history exploration day, so this will cover Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tuesday, 5/7:

So, my mom and I went to see “Challengers” again yesterday so I was in a very good mood going into this week. I was very excited to lead storytime, but also nervous. So, to prepare myself, I forced my family to be my captive audience and act like young children to prepare me for the various scenarios I could encounter! The actual kids were much more well behaved than my adult family members! I was nervous going into it, so I was going through my classic pre volleyball and basketball game routine that I have done various forms of for years. So, what I do to calm myself before anything bigger is do something lightly physical before it to get the blood pumping. So, I took a walk and then stretched while listening to a “Challengers” themed playlist I made to get the energy going. Then I eat something and afterwards start rapidly chewing gum. The gum chewing helps me give my mind something else to chew on (pun intended), then right before in the bathroom or anywhere I’ll do like the thing boxers do where they hop around in place. Listen, don’t knock it ’till you try it, it works. The other thing that majorly helped me going into games and longer class presentations was going into the situation with an “I don’t give a [ word I cannot say on this blog ] let’s just see what happens” attitude. So, I read three books today: “The Life of Pele,” “How Do You Dance?,” and “My Years of Firsts: Tries, Sighs, and High Fives”. As well as three songs: “If You Want to Hear a Story,” “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” and “Shake to My Lou”. It went really well and was so fun! Afterwards, Julie came to talk to me to ask if after the project I would still be volunteering at the museum. And I said I would love to or if possible to work for pay at the museum. And then she told me that this was also why she wanted to talk to me because Maggie and Elena are both leaving in May and then June. Elena works part time, so if that work schedule lined up with my Webster schedule, then the job could be mine! I am soooo excited and I really hope it works out! This is like one of my dream jobs, I love it, and it looks really awesome to put on applications, but that’s completely besides the point. The point is that I would love doing it and it wouldn’t feel like work, which is what counts. And I feel so lucky to be part of a community like this and so thankful that the History Museum ended up working out for my senior project. Then we had a zoom training about micro agressions. I learned that we all committ micro agressions and probably don’t even think about it, like if you refer to everyone in a meeting as “Hey, guys!” that is techincally a micro agression because not all participants identify as a guy. For the rest of the day, I worked on Hana’s project, so just captioning photos and putting them in a slideshow.

Wednesday, 5/8:

So today was a special day because I got to go down to the Soldier’s Memorial Museum. This was cool because I actually have never been inside the museum just passed by it. The exhibits are really excellent. There are four– two permanent one on various wars and World War I and then the other is from World War II to the present, downstairs we have an exhibit on Vietnam and its impact in the country of Vietnam as well as what was happening during the war in St. Louis and the aftermath, finally there’s a small gallery upstairs on the homeless veteran epidemic. The Vietnam exhibit was what I was most interested in seeing because of reading “The Things They Carried”. All wars are tragic, but to me the Vietnam War is especially so. I think the fact that the men that were being sent to Vietnam weren’t even all men– like can you imagine at 17 years old getting a draft letter that says you’re gonna have to go to this foreign land and kill people and maybe die? And then also just the fact that so many people, and even those who ended up serving didn’t want to or believe the U.S. was right to get involved and then those same people who fought for our country watched not only the enemies, but their brothers as well die out there come home and are not even greeted with an ounce of kindness, most of the times. I mean these men get back home, where they should be greeted with open arms and instead they are met by people who yell and scream at them and try to hurt them or spit on them. I mean it’s a disgusting part of our country’s history that we treated our own people this way and have essentially on a large scale brushed it under the rug for a long time. I got to work with Gary and Hershel. They are both veterans and old dudes. They were hilarious and had some really cool stories. At one point, Gary said to Hershel, “Oh! It’s almost 11:00, you know they’re gonna fire the cannon soon,” and Hershel goes, “What cannon?” and then Gary goes, “You haven’t heard the cannon?! Everyday the fire the cannon at 11:00.” Hershel was so confused and then Gary was like “There is no cannon. I thought you would realize it and play along so we could prank Ella.” As a fellow prankster, I respect Gary’s work, afterall, game recognizes game. I got to talk to Hershel more than Gary since Hershel walked me around. He served in the Navy then in the Airforce. After that, he worked for Boeing and other companies like that and traveled and lived nearly everywhere, domestically and internationally. He’s originally from Texas and had very briefly worked in St. Louis. Since his daughter lived here and he wanted to retire (his wife also really no longer wanted to be in Florida because it was too hot!) they decided to move back here, where he then worked remotely, before finally actually retiring. He’s volunteered here for about four months now. Initially, he just worked the front desk, but then Lydia asked him if he was tired of sitting around and he was like, “Yes!” and she said “How would you like to give tours?” and he was like “OK!” so now he gives tours. From 2:00 to 4:00 I just am working the front desk. It has been a very fun and relaxing day!