“Beautiful environments create beautiful students. That’s why all of the buildings I build are beautiful. If you build a prison the students will act like prisoners”, this quote stuck out to me the most from William Strickland at his seminar because it really exemplified the pride and effort he put into his charitable work for the under privaledged. Strickland’s first education center he built is in the middle of inner city Pittsburg and is in a neighborhood that has one murder a month. Although many of the students are faced with serious adversity, in the twenty-six years he has had that establishments there has not been one incident of theft or drugs in the whole campus. That’s saying a lot being that these are mostly students living below the poverty line. Strickland stated that if it weren’t for a teacher he met in high school teaching him the beauty of ceramics and encouraging him to apply to the University of Pittsburg , he would probably be in jail or dead. A lot of the students he takes in are faced with these same odds of living. Now Strickland has many education centers across the nation and is starting to expand his centers across the world.
The instructor said
Go home and write a page tonight.
And let the page come out of you--
Then, it will be true.
Sounds easy enough right?
I have my own mind
Do I? Of course I do, there is no one like me
No one was born in Miami but now lives in Tallahassee
There are no other thirteen year old cheerleaders
No other African American girls at Deerlake Middle School
If this were true, I’d be like a red rose in a sea of daisies
As lonely as every teen claim’s they are in every post, or text, or tweet.
All of us are the same
The youth in this day in age either try their hardest to be alike or to be different
A conformist, a follower, a leader, what am I?
My mind is split--- a leader is yearned for,
A conformist, inevitable---a
