junior program summer site : conversations : first session



	Brandon from Massachusetts (7/17) While it's only his first year at Explo, Brandon, a seventh grade Voyager, seems to have things figured out. He's made a lot of friends, built a roller coaster, and learned how to survive on a deserted island. Not bad for one summer! What did you do yesterday? Yesterday was our workshop day, but actually I did a lot of stuff. I had a lot of fun in my archery workshop -- we got to shoot a lot of targets and I got a bullseye, which made me feel pretty good about myself. Then I went to my improv workshop and we did a lot of fun games. Then I went back to my hall for a while for hall time and we had, like, an extra half hour to get ready for graduation. We had to get all dressed up and we got certificates for our being here, this year. We had a really good meal that night -- it was special for us, just the seventh graders. Everyone else had Off-Campus Movie Night. When we were done, we had an hour and a half of quad time, which was really fun. Then we went to bed. It was a good day. What sort of stuff do you do during quad time? It depends on what stuff is going on. Sometimes there's a big game of keep-away, like that's what I played yesterday. Sometimes we play wallball, sometimes two-square. It's all fun. Sounds awesome. So what classes are you taking? I'm taking a wilderness survival class, which is really fun. It's with Aleah, and she's a good teacher. Then I'm also taking “Thrill Ride,” which is a Lego engineering class . . . we're building roller coasters and a theme park. That's with Dylan. Cool. Tell me some more about those. In wilderness survival, our teacher has the five words of survival, which are fire, water, clothing, food, and shelter. We also talked about medical stuff, too. So in the three weeks we had to learn how to do all of them. That's a lot of fun. We've been going outside a lot. We learned how to purify water, and we learned how to build a special stretcher for moving someone . . . we used stuffed animals, but it was still tough. We had to move them all the way to the quad from West Campus. That was really fun. What about “Thrill Ride”? Right now, me and two of my friends are in the middle of building a giant roller coaster for our theme park, and everyone else is building other parts, like snack machines, bumper cars, and all the stuff you would find at a real theme park, then we're going to put them all together. Some of it is stuff I've done before. I took an after-school class in Lego engineering. It's still a lot of fun. How do you think Explo classes compare to your classes at school? They're a lot different. They're a lot more fun. When you're in the classroom here, you don't think about how you're learning stuff. You think about just having fun. It's a lot of life skills. It doesn't feel like “classes.” What do you think the word “Explo” means? It means that kids should express themselves, and that they shouldn't hide who they are. Tell me about your experience as a first-year residential student. I think it's good that it's my first year going into the seventh grade, though sometimes I wish I'd been here longer, because I think I could appreciate everything we get to do even more. But it's still great. Seventh graders get a lot of privileges and it's a lot of fun. Plus it was really easy to make friends. Even on the first day, all of the kids on my hall were really good friends with me. What are your RA's like? My RA's are Candido and Jon and they're really fun. They're RA's, but they don't seem really strict. They just have fun with us most of the time. What do you think is the most memorable thing you've done at Explo? There were a lot of memorable things, but probably graduation and Carnival Night. Carnival Night was a lot of fun. There was a dunk tank, and I got to dunk all my teachers -- I dunked Dylan and Aleah. There was cotton candy and a moon bounce. It was mostly a lot of fun because I got to hang out with my friends a lot. If you had a friend from home who was thinking about coming to Explo, what would you tell them? I would tell them that they should definitely go, and that when they go, to not pretend to be somebody else. Some of my friends from home, they don't really like sleeping over or stuff, but even if you get a little homesick, once you start thinking about it, you know you've made a good choice by going here. If Explo was a dessert, what would it be and why? I don't know . . . I don't think it could be one single dessert. I think it should be a smorgasbord of desserts, because there's really nothing that's the same about it. There's so much to choose from and do. more conversations > first session \| second session