Time, Time, Time...See What's Become of Me! By Ava Virginia Anderson

Growth Over Time

“Time is like the wind, it lifts the light and leaves the heavy.” ~Domenica Cieri Estrada.

Because finals are over, first semester is done, winter break has come and gone, and 2012 is past us, a new energy seems to glow on everybody’s faces. It’s as if we are on a second chapter to a long and adventurous book where nobody really knows the true outcome. Time, though, has taken the old stress out of the picture, making it all just a distant memory. Now, it is easier to focus on our lessons with everyone reenergized and curious. There are many ways in which my peers and I have grown since the beginning of the year in the Marin School of Environmental Leadership, but I have taken a broad approach on how our school has affected us the most. We are all back from break now, but the way in which this transition has come upon all of us is unique as if a new beginning. Like all of last year was just a learning experience and we have come back with a stronger and more confident mindset. The easiest way to explain this change is through a signature piece of MSEL,  called Project Week.

Project Week is a project that we work on in five groups of six people for an entire semester. Six project ideas are presented to the class and each and every one of us writes down our top three choices in order and based off of what we write, we are placed into a group of people who have chosen the same topic. From there, we all, as a group, come up with a project that we would like to complete and challenge ourselves with that falls under our topic. My project last semester was under the topic of “Bay Water Quality” and my group and I decided to go out into the San Francisco Bay and collect water samples to which we would test for chemicals so that we could calculate the quality of our bay. Some parts of our project we had to twist with conflicts that came up in money and time, but what matters is that we were able to end up saying that we had positively affected the world, even if in just the slightest bit.

Last fall’s project week was an experience of difficulty, laughter, mistakes, and overcoming all that went wrong. The road that we all took to put our best effort into the final presentations paid off, as we all had great success in one way or another. Two weeks ago, we were given our new projects that we would work on for all of this semester. And that was when it hit me- we were starting all over just this time, the blindfold was removed and the light of memories from last year can lead us to do better, thus, creating the perfect environment for growth. 

Goals surround us now, and plans that can lead us further into success are swarming into the minds of my peers and I. How can we use teamwork to progress more? What skills can we use to achieve better time management? How can I get my idea across the group while actively listening to the opinions of others? The break really did us a lot of good, separating the year into two easy and simple parts to make us keep going. But what all of us must learn is the idea that in MSEL you must be able to move forward like that even when the times are rough. For example, there was a time during last year’s project week when I was to make a phone call to a lab where we would test some samples from the Bay to see what types of chemicals were and were not in it. When calling, however, I forgot that I was supposed to ask the lab could donate to us so we could get the samples for free. After I had scheduled the time and types of tests for the lab and hung up I was informed that it would cost something of $2000. For the rest of that day I sat in my classes worried sick from thinking that I owed the school so much money. Relief filled me when I was able to, with some help, cancel the appointment I had had with the lab. We can all laugh at it now, but in reality, in MSEL, you must have the skill to move forward after such incidents and still make a change in the world. We must choose to feel that feeling of a new beginning when at the hardest stages of a project, or in general, life.

Time seems like a word that means something of days or weeks or years, yet truthfully, it can be just a second if you choose it to be.  And if you blossom that skill like we all did during our experience of project week, all of the stress or “heaviness” can be left behind. And here I am talking to you about new beginnings, however the word “beginning” does not really match the Marin School of Environmental Leadership. The process that all of us students, teachers, and parents have taken is similar in the way that each of us has our own goals for the semester or year or next few years. But all of it is being pulled around in a big circle, connected by strings that we must all look between the lines to notice. One project week may seem like it ends after the presentations that we give after all of our time is up and goals completed but it actually keeps going in the way that making a change in the world never stops. There are little ways to positively impact our community but we never have to be done for there is always more to learn and act upon. In reality, the MSEL experience is just an ongoing project- one that will never stop or start or begin again, but grow.