This weeks summary

     The AP season has hit my life with full force, but amidst the testing chaos this week I did manage to have a few conversations about clowning opportunities around town. Ms. Lord had mentioned a that the Youth Bureau had a Tots Spot on Saturday mornings during which I could clown. On Thursday morning I visited the Youth Bureau to inquire into this opportunity only to be told that the Tots Spot had ended for the school year and would start back up in October. That's a bummer, but Janet Olsen, the very nice lady at the entrance of the Youth Bureau, gave me some helpful suggestions about other places I would be able to clown. She suggested GIAC, IC3 and then gave me the name of the theater coordinator at IYB, along with all of the contact information. I was very thankful and more than a little pumped up that someone was so interested to help me out with my project!
    I also talked to Ms. Gergly this week and she explained that she had a young daughter with a birthday in June and that she knew of a lot of other parents with kids who had birthdays this time of the year. She suggested that I make an advertising flyer for myself and she would pass it along to her friends. Not only is this a great opportunity for a clowning experience at a birthday party, but it added another layer of my project: advertising myself! I have to let people know who I am before they can ask me to clown for them. I've thought up some ideas for the flyer and I am hoping to have it done this week.
     Lastly, I spoke with my lacrosse coach this weekend and we have a tentative date scheduled for me to clown for her special education classroom. Hopefully this Friday, May 13th from 10-10:30 I will be able to come and play with them. If not this Friday then next Friday because we have a very full week of games this week and my coach thinks I will probably be exhausted by Friday. When she said this however, I realized that clowning wouldn't be that stressful for me on the last day of a busy week, but more of a stress reliever!
      Mr. Holl and I also had a mentor meeting on Friday and reviewed my progress on my project this year and things are looking pretty good! We talked about possible dates for my presentation, taking into account both of our busy schedules and also how I wanted to present my project. I don't have all of my ideas nailed down yet but I definitely have a vision of how I would like my final presentation to flow.

Clown Video Coming Soon

So this week I've been working on the footage of my clowning excursion with the Tots and Teens group. Mr. Heurich in the library has been a tremendous help. He uploaded all the clips and has been walking me through iMovie and teaching me how to put everything together and I appreciate the time he has taken so much. I am not familiar with making movies at all so he's had his work cut out for him but has been incredibly patient. We spent seventh period on Friday working on the movie and 7th and 8th period on Monday will be dedicated to finishing it up. In the end I hope to have a short collection (maybe 3 minutes) of clips that highlights some fun parts of my clowning adventures. The footage was great from what I've seen so far; one clip even caught a kid pulling off my nose and my reaction to it! I will post it on my blog so that you all can enjoy it.

I've also been getting some great suggestions about places to clown at in the month of May to finish out my project. Ms. Lord suggested the Tot Spot at the Youth Bureau, and I am planning on either calling or visiting the youth bureau this week to see if I would be able to come and clown there. (2738364) Also this week I am going to finalize the date with my lacrosse coach, for when I can come and clown for her classroom at Cayuga Heights. She is a K-2 special education teacher and I am really excited to finally meet the children I've been hearing about for years.

Clowning at Cayuga Heights Elementary School

My lacrosse coach, Heather Murphy is a special education teacher in the school district as works at Cayuga Heights Elementary School with K-2 grades. I approached her a few days ago about clowning in her classroom and she said absolutely! We haven't set a firm date but we agreed on sometime in May, after all of the AP testing is over. Today on our bus ride home from our away game we talked about what her kids find funny. She is a great resource on how humor develops in children and what they find funny, since part of her job is to teach the kids she works with  how to interact socially and understand humor and sarcasm (because apparently they don't right now) From her descriptions, these kids are probably funnier than I ever will be without even knowing it. They have a hard time understanding the flow of conversations and plays on words go completely over their heads. They laugh when they think they're supposed to, not because they understood what was funny. So basically I could get up there and start laughing and they would laugh to because they think something must have been funny so nows the time to laugh. (this will be a great confidence boost!) Coach suggested that I bring in props and use those because visual humor is easier for them to understand. Knock-knock jokes are definitely out of the picture, but any funny sounds or questions I want to ask them are good things to do. Before this event I have to figure out how to use props and what I am going to do with them! I'm excited to go in and work with the kids in her classroom though because I've been hearing hilarious stories about their antics for years and have only met one or two of them.

Mentor Meeting and Monday Successes!

    Today I met with Mr Holl in activities for our weekly mentor meeting. We talked about my recent juggling endevours (see video below) and the people I've been trying to contact in the community. Many people in my WISE class (thanks jimmy and jordan!) have suggested that I clown for those adorable kids we see everyday in the Tots and Teens program. Since their door is always closed I was really hesitant to walk up and just knock; I didn't want to interrupt anything important or come at a bad time. A few have you many have seen me lurking around D-building earlier today, trying to decide what the best course of action would be. Fortunately, Mr. Holl suggested that I knock quietly and ask if it was a good time, using my most polite manners of course.
     Emboldened by our conversation, I left activties and went right to their door, only to find it open and the kids gone! I timidly walked in and was greeted by a really kind, enthusaistic woman who was so excited about my project! We scheduled my clowning for April 12th, 2nd period. When I introduced my name, she was even more excited because apparently she was a close friend of my aunts and knew my entire dads family. Who knew she worked right at the high school! Overall it was a great success and I shouldn't have been nervous about asking. We agreed that I would stop by the week before and make sure it was still a good day.
     Mr. Holl also suggested that I start finding schools and classrooms I can clown in during may and june and make contacts with teachers because the last months of school will be upon us before we know it.

Community Contacts

Over the past week I've been trying to get some help from the community on my project. The first thing I tried was looking up when the Cornell juggling clubs meets, because I've been having trouble moving past my simple three ball cascade and on to more difficult things. I emailed the listed president of the club who emailed back very quickly with some disappointing news. Their club has dissolved and no longer meets regularly, to my sadness and frustration. I really need someone who knows good tricks to show me how to do them. While learning from The Juggling Book has been extremely helpful, having someone who went through the same learning problems is what I needed. Fortunately Jared Dominguez was super helpful and gave me a whole list of sources that I could learn from

http://www.kingscascade.com/JugglingTricks.html

http://homepage.mac.com/abramr/juggling/tutorial/difficulty/index.html

http://www.twjc.co.uk/tutorials.html  as well as great advice with what to learn next. He said work on more three ball tricks such as columns and then practice two balls in each hand going continually until you're very comfortable and then I should start with four. He also said I could contact him with any questions I had later in the project! I've been working on my columns and my right hand with two balls and slowly but surely each day I've been getting a bit better.

    I also emailed Hilby the German Juggling Boy on tuesday, with no repsonse. I'm planning on calling this coming week because I think he would really help me develop a routine with a few pointers after seeing the videos on his website http://www.hilby.net/who.html. And after all this project is all about interactions with others. I'm assuming my best resources will be other clowns.

    Lastly, I've been searching the Cornell and Ithaca College websites for the past hour trying to find a professor in the physcology or sociology departments who specializes in humor development or sociaal interactions through jokes but as it turns out, no one specializes in that directly. So I'm trying to search through people who's backgrounds look close to those topics and email them with my project idea and ask for their thoughts on what people find funny.