Hello again everyone, my name is Ben Erickson and I am a first-year VISTA serving in Lincoln, MI (don’t feel bad for not knowing  where it is) at Alcona High School/Middle School. I’ve had some additional duties added in the last few months at my site, as well as some duties fading out of my work area due to restructuring.
 
Firstly, though, for those of you that were wondering about November National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), we had a final tally of over 114,000 words written during NaNoWriMo! The best part is that since that time, most of those students have wanted to continue meeting, talking about writing techniques and ideas, crazy literary devices, and we have begun talking about using some absurd writing prompts which I can use to show the board of education what these students have been up to! Feel free to contact me if you’re interested in looking at some of these prompts, because quite a few of them are really interesting!
 
Also, toward the end of 2017 I was made aware of a relationship that used to exist between the school and a branch from a local church that works with underprivileged kids called the Samaritans. They had started up a peer mentoring program in the school a few years ago utilizing dual enrolled (DE) kids, since they have free periods during the day. This program fell off the radar last year, so I took to it to revive it this year with the phenomenal group of students that I have now in dual enrollment. I’m happy to say that it succeeded! I had 13 DE students sign up to be one-on-one mentors to Middle School students this year, and after meeting with my Middle School teachers was able to get a solid recommendation list of students. After a month or so of prep-work, I was able to match all of them up to five 6th graders, seven 7th graders and one 8th grader! They have cleared out and organized the mentees' lockers, helped with school work, played some games, answered questions, and talked about some pretty important aspects of each other’s lives. I’ve heard conversations about parents in prison and how that affects families, sibling relationships, goofy habits, and so many other things. We still have a little over a month left and I’m excited to see where the program ends up.
 
Dual enrollment has shifted a bit out of my workload, however, as the school has transitioned into Early/Middle College that they are starting next year! This is a huge opportunity for these students, and though it means lots of work on our end, there are so many positives to this that I’m excited to see what happens in the next couple years. However due to the nature of the program, it is being headed by the school counselor so a bit less of that workload frees me up to spend more time on the mentoring program, music (including a couple impromptu performances that the school has had me do during assemblies), and the creative writing projects. And also, somewhere in the mix, writing for grants to improve the student center which currently has no budget at all. We will see where all of this lands!

​Hello everyone, my name is Ben Erickson and I am a first-year VISTA serving in Lincoln, MI (don’t feel bad for not knowing where it is) at Alcona High School/Middle School. I’ve mostly been overseeing their dual enrollment program, which is still fairly new, and my first couple months have most certainly been interesting.
 
The first task I had was essentially renovating the library at the school, which had been more or less unused for several years, in order to make it a work environment for dual enrollment and online-based students. Do you know what a room looks like that hasn’t been cleaned in probably a year or more? I do! But I’m really glad that I did, because now we have a couple hundred students that come in throughout the day to work on classes, get input on assignments, and play some games of chess, which has gotten surprisingly popular this year.
 
Also, shortly into the start of the school year, I had contact with a local musician who was starting up a nonprofit to give free guitar lessons to low-income students in my area starting with, you guessed it, my school. So my first couple weeks were filled with making sure college professors were set up well in the school, finding a space for guitar lessons to happen, meeting an almost entirely new administration, and answering a whole LOT of grammar and composition questions from sophomores who were dual enrolled, something that we only started allowing this year. And we have seen incredible results! Especially since a very large portion of our students are first-year college students, and so they are facing impressive issues trying to understand their role as a student when their parents or siblings aren’t sure how to help them.
 
October and November have been a whirlwind as well. October, as many of you know, is Michigan college month, so we had a huge push for college applications. With the help of our Michigan College Access Network worker here, we were able to have 100% college application among our seniors, meaning, every single senior filled out at least one college application. We had one senior fill out 23 college applications! It helped that he was being recruited for soccer after breaking a national record. We had another student fill out 15 applications, and a majority of our seniors have already heard back from colleges with multiple acceptance letters.
 
Interspersed throughout October as well, I began promoting and meeting with students interested in participating in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. This is a nonprofit program where the goal is to join with thousands of writers to write a full novel of 50,000 words between November 1st and November 30th. I was able to take a group of interested students through writing practices, show them resources for expanding their writing ideas, work on story elements and plotting, and get them ready to work in November! We have been meeting twice a week to troubleshoot novel problems, work with new concepts (Deus Ex Machina, of course), and just see how everyone is doing. It isn’t over yet, and I’m currently sitting at 44,583 words (of course I did it with them, that’s half the fun!), but as a whole we are currently at over 110,000 words! Feel free to ask after November is over just how many we got.
 
It’s been a couple months filled with intense and constant challenges, but not only have I survived, I have seen a plethora of new lives and directions coming out the other side. And there are so many writing contests, conversations, and crazy new projects to go!