Another Party, Another Walk

Goodness!  May certainly seems to have gone quite quickly.  It seems like just yesterday I was at the Foley Square protest (still don't have those pictures, sorry! Maybe I'll have better motivation to double check for my camera from now on).  As previously mentioned, I had a minor event of the LSA Spring Gala since our last chat.  As I was working, I was not able to take too many pictures of the event itself, but beforehand I got a lot of the venue and the view from it.  We had the gala at the Mandarin Hotel, apparently a favorite of famous and notorious, right on Columbus Circle in full view of Central Park.  The full-time party planners spent the whole day on location, setting up tables, directing caterers, putting out fires, and other such problems I didn't have to deal with.  

At first, Brittany, Karoline, and I basically had nothing to do, so we took advantage of the chance to peruse the silent auction items (VIP tickets to The Daily Show, an iPad, jewelry, clothes, designer handbags) while sampling the hors d'oeuvres we wouldn't get to eat once the actual guests started arriving.  This was my first favorite part of the evening.  It was interrupted by being directed to our place at the silent auction table to get people to bid on program costs (instead of buying tickets or wine or accessories they would just get that warm fuzzy feeling slightly aided and abetted by the open bar).  This seemed a bit ridiculous, but it worked somehow, and after the first thirty minutes or so we literally had people waiting to give us their credit card information in return for a flashy light up heart necklace or pin that we were giving out to mark who had given at our table.

Eventually, we were allowed to sit down at our table hidden in the back far away from the high rollers with other non-grown ups for the giving of awards and watching of slideshows and other such programed parts.  The speaker journalist from the local public radio station who happened to have immigrated herself.  As she was not officially a part of the agency, she got to say really frank things about things like our clients and immigrants and tell an anecdote about visiting Arizona since the passing of a few discriminatory laws without taking the smile off our executive director's face.  Francis, the longest volunteer at LSA and definitely the sweetest, got a Daisy award (the daisy is the symbol of LSA), and the speech introducing her was also quite touching.

The last part of the program was definitely the most impressive.  An auctioneer from Sotheby's came in and worked some magic for about 20 minutes or so after which time we had raised $100,000 or so.  In 20 minutes.  The best was after the normal auction part where he just said, "Who's donating $30,000? $25,000?" and kept going as hands kept flying up and the closest one of us without $20,000 altogether, let alone to spare, tried to quickly go over and get some credit card info.  I also had a guest order wine from me, to the embarrassment of his wife/girlfriend/date/girl friend who insisted this was not my job (it wasn't, but he used a Billy Joel song, so I did it anyway).

Afterwards, a bunch of us went out together as a going away celebration of sorts for an intern in the Preventive department who has now completed her Masters in Social Work and is taking it to San Francisco (note: everyone here either moves to New Jersey or California or they moved from Ohio).  Overall, it was pretty enjoyable to go, nice to have something to be doing most of the time instead of the awkward "mingle" directive that some people got (people came to me, I didn't have to interrupt their conversations), and I'm pretty ecstatic I didn't have to plan it.

Today marks the official last day of tutoring.  I had one of my most easily distracted students (or most persistently distracted...she'd rather do almost anything than what I want her to be doing) and my student who would most rather be speaking Spanish at any given moment.  Next Tuesday is an open house for Free Arts, the program I've been helping with two evenings a week that most of my kids participated in that and should therefore be there, but I'm a little sad to think that the next three months I'll be at the agency but not chatting with my six regulars every week, even though I'm sure I had at least one day with each of them when I reeeaaally wanted a parent to pick them up early.  In July, we'll start a more intensive Reading Academy with professional teachers, but I don't yet know which kids will be coming.

During my last session with my one private school kid, she showed me this end-of-summer practice kit.  It's probably only for private school kids (between two sessions, she literally had an entire extra backpack of stuff...including the backpack), but the workbooks are really ingenious.  Instead of just writing the answers in and checking them in the back of the book, the kids put a lettered tile on the number that it's the answer to in their "Versa-Tiles" thingamajig (I'm not really sure what it would be called, but it's awesome).  Once all the questions are answered, the thingamajig is closed, flipped over, and reopened to reveal the pattern that the answers create on their back.  This way, parents can check the answers just by looking to see if their child's pattern matches the answer key at the bottom of the page.  Hopefully, it will help make math fun and parents useful resources.  We gave the kids presents for the end of the year, but just books and stuff.

Ok, that's all for now.  There are some more pictures on the Photo Bucket site the slideshow links to, otherwise see you next time!