Kristen Fabick
Having just graduated from the University of Alabama in Huntsville with my Bachelor’s of Science degree in Mathematics and my Middle and Secondary Education Teaching Certificates, I decided to dedicate a year of my life to Mission Year.
I have several purposes in doing Mission Year. First, I want to gain a better understanding of the world as a whole—not just the world I have grown up in. I want to learn how to love people, all people, in a more effective and meaningful way. I want to help people learn and grow, and in return I want to learn and grow from their help. Most of all, I want to serve God and carry out the work He has for my life.
Fresh out of college seemed like a great time in my life for this type of experience. I am not used to a regular job or schedule yet. I am not used to having much money. I am not used to living in one place for more than 6 months. And I am ready to learn about the world by living in it instead of reading books and discussing them in class.
About Mission Year
Mission Year is a year long urban ministry program focused on Christian service and discipleship. We take teams of young people, place them in an area of need, and help them to serve people and create community. We are committed to the command of Jesus to “love God and love people,” by placing the needs of our neighbors first and developing committed disciples of Christ with a heart for the poor. Learn more about our first year program…
Kristen Fabick's Blog
25 kids/leaders...16 seats...$10 each....1 skybox / May 7, 03:03 PM
every-so-often..maybe once a month, urban promise gets donated some type of sporting event tickets. sometimes these tickets are used by the urban trekkers (a club for high school kids), sometimes they are used by the after-school program camp directors to take out camp kids (grades 5-8), and sometimes they are used by the street leaders (high school kids that work at the after-school program). sometimes people from the community buy tickets and donate them to UP, and other times the sporting teams and/or venues simply donate a certain number of tickets. in any case, it is great to see the local community supporting the ministry of urban promise and the value that people place on providing opportunities for inner-city kids to see what possibilities lie beyond their block and neighborhood.
a couple months ago, i went with the urban trekkers to a philadelphia soul (indoor football team) game. the tickets had been bough by a corporation called monarch plastics and donated to the trekker program. (monarch plastic also sponsors numerous other events for the trekkers and several of the employees of monarch plastics serve as mentors/sponsors to individual students at urban promise academy.) in addition to the tickets, monarch plastics also provided $20 for each person to spend on food/souveniers/etc. i know prices are ridiculously high at such events ($2.75 for a bottle of water?), but still….$20 is a generous donation.
more recently, urban promise was given 25 tickets to a camden riversharks (minor league baseball team) game for this past friday night—see picture below.
these tickets were not just general admission…they were tickets for the delaware river port authority’s skybox—complete with indoor couches, indoor bar to eat at while watching the game, outdoor patio seating, and a tv on which some of the guys watched the celtics basketball game. why you go to a baseball game to watch a basketball game i don’t know…but they enjoyed both games immensely so that’s all that really matters i suppose. i guess the delaware river port authority donated the tickets…i’m not sure. anyway, each ticketholder was also given $10 in rivershark money (paper coupons that could only be spent at the stadium but were treated just like dollar bills). the prices at this game were slightly lower than at the football game, but you could get a decent dinner (chicken fingers, fries, and a drink) for just under $10.
on friday night, 2 camp directors, 6 interns, a couple street leaders, and 15 kids (25 people total) loaded onto the urban promise bus and headed to the stadium. the skybox only had 16 seats, but that was hardly a problem since most of the time at least 6-10 people were out of the box getting food, playing in the fun zone area for kids, or walking around the stadium taking in all the sights. besides enjoying being at a sporting event where i had room to stand up and walk around and sit down without being in other people’s seats, i think the highlight of my evening was when finley (the riversharks mascot) came into our skybox for a visit. the kids went absolutely nuts (yes…8th graders going nuts over a guy or girl dressed in a shark costume…it was beautiful). one of the kids pulled out his phone and started playing the soulja boy song “crank that”. (if you don’t know the song…that’s ok…it was really, really popular in the fall, and soulja boy does a pretty neat dance that all the kids have learned.) so the song started playing and finley started doing the dance! at least as best as he/she could in a shark suit. the kids totally lost it then. i think some of them were on the floor laughing.
every friday night, the riversharks have a fireworks show at the end of their game. the amount and quality of the fireworks really surprised me. i think the show lasted for about 10 minutes. here is a picture.
i really enjoyed watching the baseball game, but more than that, i enjoyed watching the kids enjoy the game and the atmosphere. i hope that i have more opportunities to take kids to events like this in the summer.
math dare / Apr 17, 12:12 PM
last friday all 6 of the urban promise after-school programs gathered together at the campus in east camden (where the up schools—the k-8 forward school and the 9-12 academy—are located) to participate in the 15th (?) annual math dare competition.
this event is based of the popular 90’s tv show double dare in which two teams—red and blue, usually two families) answered trivia questions to earn points and to earn opportunities to compete in physical challenges to earn more points.
we created teams by pairing a younger kids program (grades 1-4) with an older kids program (grades 5-8) based on geographical location in the city. the teams were South (my team), East, and North/Downtown. each team was represented by a different color. for every math question, two people from each team sat in the “hot seats” in front of the rest of their teams (who were cheering them on). So three teams…two people from each team….so six people total were working on the same math problem. whoever finished correctly first would wave a flag. their team would win points. each grade had 2 math problems to complete. after every two grades, there was a physical challenge.
the physical challenges included an intern smearing peanut butter all over their face and trying to “catch” various food items (sunflower seeds, cheesy puffs, popcorn, etc.) on their face. in the physical challenge i partook in, kids used only their mouths to fill a pitcher halfway with pasta salad. the pasta salad was in a large bowl across the gym, and i had a piece of paper wrapped in a circle to put on top of my head to “catch” the past salad. then i would dump the pasta from my “head bucket” to the pitcher. other physical challenges included making a human pizza (an intern got flour, water, pizza sauce, cheese, and pepperonis scattered on them) and kids spinning around a bat (with their head on the bat and the bat on the ground) 10 times and then running across a 2×4×10 laid on the ground. the catch was that there was shaving cream all around the board, so if you slipped off…you really SLIPPED off.
there were two big highlights of the evening for me. first, though east side has won this competition 12 out of the 15 years it has been held, south (my team) won this year!!! not only did we win…we totally blew out the other two teams. the real competition was for second place. i was so proud of our kids who competed, and i know that winning an academic type competition really boosted their self-esteem and self-concepts of their abilities to excel academically. (east is notorious for having “better students”.)
the second, and best, highlight for me was when the emcees reminded the students of urban promise’s “as one” philosophy (see recent newsletter about the urban promise olympics) in which the leadership at urban promise is trying to get the students to embrace kids from all over camden, instead of just their immediate neighborhood, as their friends and partners. in keeping with this philosophy, the emcees started giving out points to teams that were cheering loudest for OTHER teams. it was so heart-warming and awesome to see kids that usually just crack jokes on other camps and try to compete with other neighborhoods for “who goes hardest” actually cheering those same kids. i know they just wanted the points, but it was an awesome picture of the body working together to spur one another on to good works.
life after mission year?!??! (milton hershey school) / Apr 14, 09:55 AM
i know i know…its only april. mission year goes until august 5th. but in my world that means its definitely time to start figuring out what lies ahead for my life after mission year.
i have looked into several options. i have considered staying in camden and teaching at the urban promise academy (as their second math teacher) to give them a little greater diversity in the courses they can offer. the biggest downfall with this plan is that i would probably have to have a second job or find some additional work that i can pick up on the weekends (such as tutoring for suburban students or for local college students) in order to build some savings. also, the school is young and small and, though it offers great support, they are limited in their resources and in how they can help me as a first-year teacher.
the other big opportunity i have looked into is teaching at the milton hershey school (mhs) in hershey, pennsylvania. i first heard about hershey at a teaching job fair in huntsville, al (while i was in college) about a year ago. since then, i have been thoroughly interested in this school and its teaching philosophy. mhs is a boarding school for underprivileged (low-income) students in grades pre-k through 12. currently, the high school has about 700 students and they are trying to grow to 1000 before they simply try to maintain their size. as a result of such growth, there are 3 new math teaching positions available for next school year.
i saw these positions online and thought…oh…cool…ill fill out an application and see if anything happens. i never really expected much to come of this, because i feel so inexperienced and the schools website gave me the impression that most of the teachers there have masters degrees and have been teaching for more than 10 years. i kind of thought, “maybe i can teach for a few years somewhere else and then apply and get a job at hershey after i have some experience (and more to offer)”. my parents told me repeatedly “they have to hire someone” and “some school has to hire first year teachers” and “don’t sell yourself short”.
parents…they tend to be right…not that i have a job offer…but i have been through two interviews with hershey already! i got a phone call two days before i was to come back to tn for about a 7 day easter break. the assistant principal had reviewed my application and would like to set up a phone interview…the NEXT DAY. so i did the phone interview (about an hour) and was told that within 2 weeks i would hear back about the next step in the interview process. the morning after my phone interview, i was traveling by airplane to tn. when i got off my first flight, i had a voice mail from the assistant principal. they wanted to invite me to the school to teach a 15 minute lesson (to administrators and teachers) and to have a face-to-face interview. not only that, they wanted me to come the first day i was back from my break! we negotiated to change the date to the second monday i was back from break (which was april 7th).
so, last monday, i rented a car (which mhs is going to reimburse me for) and drove to the school. i got there around 11 and my interview was at 2:30. i observed some classes, talked to some teachers, ate lunch with the students, and met another prospective teacher (who was interviewing for a math position as well) before my interview. as it turns out, this guy flew in the day before from huntsville, al! crazy! he took a couple classes at the university of alabama in huntsville (where i went to college) but he graduated from Oakwood College (a small, seventh-day adventist, private college just around the bend—literally—from UAH).
the other crazy thing that happened during my visit was i met a group of students that are raising money for “the children of malawi”. i asked how they were donating the money, and they said they were still looking for an organization to give through. one of the other ubran promise interns in camden this year is from malawi and is going back in june to start an after-school ministry there. and he is looking for funding! i told the students this and got their contact information. once i got back to camden, i gave the UP intern their information and emailed them his information. hopefully god was working and will continue to work through those connections.
i do not know anything yet about the interview other than the fact that i enjoyed it greatly and feel like i represented myself well. if they hire me they will get what they saw. if they choose not to hire me they will know what they are missing. its all out of my hands now. i pray that god will open doors if i am supposed to be there and that he will close them and help me seek other opportunities for next year if hershey is not where he wants me next year.
stay tuned…i will keep you all posted on what i think my life after mission year will be like.
valentine's day...i know i know....that was more than a month ago.... / Mar 19, 03:50 PM
here are a couple pictures from some fun games that we played on valentines day.
since vday fell on a thursday this year (and thursday nights are when we have training for mission year), our city director (caz) decided to have an evening of food, games, fellowship, and a period of time set aside for affirming our teammates.
in one picture i have included, we picked a team member to put shaving cream all over their face. another team member had a certain amount of time to throw as many cheese puffs onto the first team members face as possible. the team with the most cheese puffs stuck to someone’s face at the end of the time won.
in the other picture, we played a game in which a member from one team competed against a member from another team. in this game, each person was given a full can of coke, a candle and a lighter. the object was to finish the can of coke first. however, you could only drink while your candle was lit. the person you were competing against would try to blow out your candle, but also try to drink their coke at the same time.
both games were hilariously successful. we enjoyed a fun evening just being with each other and sharing our love for one another in a relaxed and natural way. after eating and playing games, each team separated for a while to read some scripture that we had previously selected as representative of each member of our team. we read the scripture and then told our team mates why that verse reminded us of them and/or how they embody that particular aspect of christ and scripture.
pictures on my newsletter / Mar 13, 03:12 PM
in case you had trouble making out the pictures on my newsletter…here they are! one is a picture of the plate of raw onion, pickle, and earthworms that teams of kids had to eat.
the other is kids drinking during the fear factor: human blender competition. i think they drank a mixture of whole milk, gravy, green beans, pickles, and some other stuff i’m sure. all the solid foods were blended up like they had previously been chewed before they were mixed in with the liquids….eww….it was sick. only about half of the kids got the entire cup down without spitting up into the trash can.
