PATHfinders

The feelings of excitement for a fun day ahead and pride in the fact that you are spending part of your summer help pull you out of bed earlier than you might in a “typical” summer.

Meeting at St. John the Evangelist on the south side of Tucson, you gather with other rising 6th, 7th, and 8th graders (and some fearless high school LITs) as you board the bus and head across town to St. Augustine Catholic High School.

The moment you step off the bus at St. A’s, you can feel that this isn’t your average school experience. Rising Teachers (college students) are there to greet you with wild enthusiasm in some creative new way, and then you all go enjoy free breakfast and some time to catch up with new and old friends.

This is basically a high energy, program-wide assembly. Games, singing, dancing, cheering… a bunch of things you may not think you’re quite awake for, but it turns out to be exactly what you need, as you’re introduced to a theme for the day. Today, you play a nice, loud game of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” Super Bowl and discuss the importance of Active Participation.

Making your way to the reading classroom, you settle in for a very full period. Class time begins with a large group debate on the value of reading fiction. After some time peacefully reading a short story of your choosing, you then dive into small group work creating an artistic depiction to convince someone of the value of the story you read. Before you know it, it’s time to pack up!

Upstairs in the math classroom, you and your classmates jump right into a number talk, excitedly sharing the shocking number of different ways you got to your answers. From there, you continue working on creating a stop motion video from translations on a coordinate plane.

Time flies, and it’s already time to start 3rd period with a snack break while you chat with a new friend who you met at PATH. When writing class begins, you dive into writers’ workshop rotations to keep honing the fiction stories that you get to write for yourself!

When you get to the science lab, your Rising Teacher leads a review of lab safety before you gather the necessary materials for your group. Yesterday, you made predictions observed as various items were dropped into water, and now that you’ve discovered the formula for density, it’s your turn to calculate as a small group to know if something will float without even needing to test it.

After a quick but careful clean-up of the science lab, you and your classmates join the other grades back in the cafeteria for lunch. You sit next to a couple of high school LITs and pepper them with questions about the school you hope to attend in a couple of years.

Piling into another new classroom, you and a group of PATHfinders from a combination of grades and schools can't help but break into smiles as you take turns sharing the funniest names you could think of for your future fashion lines. After that warm-up, you're back to cutting and shaping the fabrics and designs you've decided on based on your favorite parts of what you've learned about Ghanaian culture and style, making big progress toward the final showcase you are creating!

At breakfast, your table cheered the loudest, so you got first pick for your PATime activity, which means you enjoy a giant game of soccer!

Filing back into the theater, you anxiously await today’s “M&M” skit to see what kind of nonsense PATHfinder Pat and his friends will get into today. Sure enough, Pat’s hesitance to actively participate leads to him getting left behind on a safari, and he has some wild interactions with animals before rejoining his group and applying the lesson he’s learned about the value of active participation.

Today’s prayer isn’t in the chapel where it often is. Everyone is actually back in the cafeteria participating in a high energy yet still somehow very powerful and meaningful round of “musical prayers”, reminding the whole group that sometimes prayer requires us to actively go out of our comfort zone and participate, not just let someone else do the reflecting and speaking.

Your small group sits at a picnic table under a tree in the courtyard. It feels like a random yet still very inviting group of PATHfinders from all grades, plus your group’s LIT and Rising Teacher who guide the conversation. Today you all take turns talking about what makes it difficult sometimes to actively participate and how you want to grow in that. You find it particularly interesting to hear what this looks like in high school and college.

Somehow, it’s already time to head home! You said goodbye to your Rising Teachers, and as the bus pulls away, you see them dancing and waving, and you know that they’ll be right there again tomorrow, ready to welcome you back for another (very full and very fun) day!