Shining through

I refuse to live my life without passion, and that includes my job.  I've heard it said that about 30% of your life is spent at work, and I can't comprehend why someone would throw away 30% of their life doing something they're apathetic about.  I hate apathy.  I'm not where I want to be in my career, and I don't have the luxury of doing exactly what I want as my job, but while I continue working towards my goals, I have nevertheless found a job that I am genuinely passionate about.  I work with children in a ballet scholarship program and help audition them for that program, and I believe our program gives the children -- many of whom live in difficult circumstances and haven't had a lot of opportunity in their lives -- opportunities to develop the drive and passion and learn the skills and discipline necessary to pull themselves above their circumstances and fully strive towards their hopefully very lofty goals in life.  Traveling to schools to audition their students for our program can result in vastly different experiences day-to-day.  Most days I can gloss over the conditions of the school and see the individual children -- on those days, I see so much obvious potential and feel uplifted by the end of the day by the difference we can make in the students' lives.  Other days, though, I find it difficult to believe the learning and behavioral conditions of the school we're visiting, and I struggle so much to work through the audition, fighting the unruliness and talking and yelping and disorderliness that has clearly become habitual to the students there, that by the end of the day I feel worn down and struggle to see individual students shine through the murk of the audition experience that day.  Today was, for the most part, one of the latter days.  And it got me thinking about how different the audition experience is from one school to the next not just for me but for the children auditioning as well....

One day kids listen and fold their hands and tell me how much they desperately want to study ballet, and one day they all scream over me and push and shove each other and refuse to stop talking.

One day a student at an auditioning school is late because she went to the book fair, and as I watch her walk through the hallway, it seems every student of every age knows her by name and says hello to her and asks how she is.  Another day an adult makes fun of and groans at an auditioning boy in his ballet outfit as he walks through the hallway, and as the audition class continues, I see another adult drag in a boy from the lunch room and I realize the boy is actually pummeling a second boy underneath him.

One day a kid sitting quietly in the auditorium says he doesn't want to audition, and I kneel next to him for a couple minutes and talk to him, and we have a moment and he auditions and has fun; another day a kid in a noisy gym where there are a total of four 25-out-of-control-screaming-kid classes (one about to audition, two running around when they should be sitting quietly preparing to audition, and one that has nothing to do with us but is actually having their class conducted in the gym) says he doesn't want to audition, and as I walk backwards from him I just throw out over the noise, "No, you should do it --  it's fun, it's like gym class!" and give a shrug before running over to try to silence 25 of those screaming children and hurry up and give them their audition class.

One day I give some extra instruction about turn-out during the audition and wait to proceed to the next movement until all the kids understand and have correctly completed the last movement, and one day, when I have kids facing five different directions, including directly away from me, and they're all talking and won't face me -- probably because they can't hear me over their own talking and shouting -- I give up and shout the remaining steps regardless of how many kids are doing them and just hope that any kids who care are watching closely enough they can get it.

One day I feel like we've made a difference, and one day I feel like it's a hopeless cycle of many of the kids most in need of a better education and foundation being trapped in an environment that comes close to prohibiting them from learning the behavioral skills they need in order to meet opportunities (such as our program) that will allow them to go further.

...But then I see one tiny little girl with beautiful pointed feet who leans in to hear every word I say.  When we do across-the-floor exercises one at a time, she looks at me with all her concentration for her cue to go.  When the other kids' shouting gets unbearable and it's impossible to hear, I realize she's no longer looking at my eyes but at my lips to read my words.  And at the end of the day, she gets a full scholarship to our program.

Difficult to shine through?  Absolutely.  Impossible?  Absolutely not.