I have a friend on the board of the the Learning Lab, and for the last two years she has been in charge of the centerpieces. I'm one of the people that she has recruited to help get everything set-up, which is fun, but better yet is our reward of having a table at the luncheon and getting to hear the speakers, participate in the auction, buy raffle tickets, and basically just spend the whole day with books and people who love books.
The centerpieces are mostly books (workbooks for a new language, GED help, children's books) with ribbons and colorful doodads that add interest. People buy the centerpieces, then donate them back to the Learning Lab. We collect the ribbons and doodads to use again next year. Last year we had 72 tables, this year 84. I'm sure the fundraiser was a big success. I was outbid on all my baskets and books, but I brought home a list that I'm ordering from Amazon, and plenty of ideas for auction baskets for BEA or Trail Wind.
I saw several nice outfits - not like what I usually see when I'm with a group of school teachers or church ladies. Our chicken dish was surprisingly very good. The speakers were both excellent. They always have a student from the Learning Lab and an author. I found out the they're changing the GED at the end of the year and if you haven't completed all of the tests, then you have to start over. That doesn't seem fair. And I had a very enjoyable day off work.
The student speaker had dropped out of Capital High in 1996, just a few months before graduating. She was pregnant and thought it would be easy to pick up her GED. It wasn't. She had tried to study on her own, and enrolled in another program that didn't work, before she found her way to the Learning Lab. She's now passed four of the five tests with honors, and is learning algebra and geometry so that she can take her final test this summer. I was so struck when she said that since 2009, when she started, she's read 13 books - and she liked them! Imagine the difference it makes in the lives of her children, when she succeeds and reads.
The author grew up in Boise and I knew her mom as a school board member. Alyssa Harad has written a memoir that deals with her study of scents and perfume. She told a story of a time when she was working with young people in the mental hospital here in Boise. A boy of ten who couldn't read or write attended her poetry writing classes and was a rock star among the others because of his poetry. She would start the class by reading a few poems, then the students would write and share their own. This boy would pretend to write, but really only drew big loopy scribbles. He "read" his poems and others were wowed. Once at the beginning of class she stopped reading because she thought this boy was getting upset. He told her not to stop, because he found his poems in the poetry that she was reading. She then encouraged us to not stop reading, because others find their poems or their stories through our reading. It was very powerful in a room full of book lovers.
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