City Semester: The Bronx Experience: First Day! Can You Dig It (the disorientation or the kwaaaa?!)

The day started off with a little overview of what our time together will entail, overall-Mr. Meyers suggests we "Dis-Orient" ourselves, for there was(perhaps, still is) some orienting to be done. Turning the focus on the science we will study in the city Mr. Waldman brought up a few maps on the board. Giving a visual of where we are, he has us identify our homes orientation in relationship to its neighborhood, neighboring neighborhoods, the region it is in with boarders recognized by the city, the city in relation to the rest of New York state, and where New York state is in relation to the world. Going back to our where we were oriented at this point, we were in class. And it was before 9:30. And our entire career as a student completely changed within an hour. At least, that's how I felt. So, the term "Dis-Orientation" definitely fit.

Parading through the halls, we made our way to our new "Morning Coffee Clubhouse" ...thinking about it now, I feel like that name for our room just completed our little time travel back to the '70s- (it'll all make sense in a bit, I promise) There we went over logistics, started realizing how crazy we are for signing up to do work, saw technology fuddle our teachers, got over our first awkward club meeting, and receive our colorful schedules.

A lovely young advisee of Mr. Krakowsky, I believe her name was Izzie(?), designed this beautiful logo/poster for us- it has our standard Grecian cup, some people kayaking in coffee, and the New York City skyline as our backdrop! Yay!

Again, we sort of get herded through the halls to Mr. Meyers' room. Now, the caffeine was hitting us(or maybe just me, I don't know about the rest of my classmates) and our first "Apple Core" was to take place. Mr. Krakowsky starts off by explaining how he views the world. That history isn't linear, and life doesn't work in such an organized way, but that he sees things in layers and webs. Layers are large identifiers, location, time period, etc. In these layers are webs of lives, groups, organizations and their contacts, their family members, tragedies, who they probably encountered or opposed. Jumping off of this, Dr. Banks tell us that we are going to travel back in time to the 70's and try to picture New York during the chaos of economic downfall, counterculture remnants, commercial boom, and these "tribes" that form just as they always have. We are brought to our 90 minute, 1979 time warp- The Warriors.

Thus, we are given the task to form our own tribe. Find a name, create a logo, an outfit for the tribe, rap or slogan, and a secret handshake. Tribe members only.