“Why I want to be a CIT”
Hard to believe but Biocitizen is 10 years old now! One of the deepest joys I (Kurt the director) have experienced is derived from witnessing our students develop from little kids, into adolescents and then into young adults. The school’s CIT program and our junior staff is made of Wings who became Sharpshins and then assumed positions of leadership and responsibility.
As a way of expressing gratitude for, and to celebrate, these important members of the Our Place teaching team, we’re posting a “statement of interest” that we require our CITs to submit. Biocitizen requires these statements because (on our end) its a way of confirming the student is actually interested in assisting our teachers (and not just pressured by parents to be one) and (on their end) the statements provide them with an opportunity to define themselves, which is challenging but worth it because, in the long run, the confidence and mindfulness that attends “knowing thyself” is the key to a happy, meaningful life.
Drawn from a pile of equally amazing statements to give you the gist, Gemma Weisenfreund’s gives you a glimpse into the ways that Biocitizen is more than just a field environmental philosophy school — it’s a conceptual and physical space unlike any other, where wonderers can wander and get off the screen and into the green, and there witness aspects of reality and themselves that are as primordial, real and resilient as the elements, themselves. They bring what they find in the field back with them to their home, their family and friends, their schools and to their own miraculous destinies.
“We are more than we have been taught” is a Biocitizen maxim, and it is joy and and honor to know that all our CITs and junior staff have used the school to grow in positive ways they might never have grown, and even more that they represent our school, and explain its values and subjects using their own un-coached words. This is how I always hoped Biocitizen would grow.
Thank you CITs!! Thank you Junior staff!! Thank you parents and friends and supporters! You have helped the first FEP school in the world up on its feet and now we’re walking—
