For my capstone project, I decided to create a middle school cheer team with two other senior girls. We called it the “middle school Pep Squad.” Within this project, we taught them how to cheer properly, but that wasn’t our main focus. Although we cheered during practices and middle school basketball games, we took out time to actually get to know these children and build bonds with each and every one of them. We took time to create a social life within our pep squad and this helped build friendships and helpful support systems.
Creating this team with partners was a little difficult at times, but we ultimately all the had the same goal, which was the make these children happy and make them feel like they belonged somewhere. This experience has taught me that even though sometimes you work with friends, everyone will not always agree and things could get bad depending on how big the disagreements are. This experience also taught me how to work with children and how to work through the hard times and frustrations, but also, to never give up. At one point in our capstone, towards the end, the students started to slack off in school and we had no idea until we talked about it. We told them that school must come first and that all of three of us are there to help them with anything they need. We were afraid that some of them would fail and not be able to participate in our Pep Squad anymore. We took a day off from practice and just had a homework/study session. We helped the middle school students in their areas of struggle, which seemed to be mostly math and science. After about two weeks, we asked them all how their grades were doing, and they all had improved in all the areas. We didn’t give up on them and we learned that in order to be the support system that some needed, we had to put their problems before anything cheer-related, but we were all ok with that.
My capstone project really impacted myself and the middle school students in a positive way. The middle school students created new friendships with each other, which would have never come about if they hadn’t joined our Pep Squad. They became so comfortable talking us, seniors, about everyday things and asking us for advice, like if we were their mentors. They were all joined together by something they all enjoyed doing, and that was one of our goals. Serving these middle school students is an experience I will never forget. It included something I loved doing, which was cheering, while also interacting with these sweet kids. While helping the kids with their grades and homework during one practice, one of the girls was very disappointed in herself because she thought she was going to upset me. I assured her I was not upset, I just wanted to help her and it touched me because she reminds me of myself when I was in middle school. When this happened, I realized that I felt a deeper connection to this girl and decided it would be best if I became her mentor. At the beginning of this entire project, I thought I was going to have a difficult time since I opted out of taking a capstone class in order to take Calculus BC. I thought I was going to fall behind and my partners were going to be doing all the planning without me, but it was not like that at all. It was kind of frustrating hearing seniors, who had capstone classes, complain because I didn’t even have the time everyday to work on it. This was an accomplishment for me, because I was determined to get this project done and make it the best experience the middle school students could have. Along with not having a capstone class, working with partners was a little frustrating at times because I didn’t always feel like my partners were putting in all their time and effort like this project deserved. There were issues we had to overcome, but through it all, we never let that affect our project or the middle school students. It taught me that being cordial and compromising is very important in a lot of teamwork situations.