I just talked to Elle and she got the Teach for America offer!  Now it’s time to spend the next week deciding if she wants to go for it.  Though she worked really hard for it and is leaning towards that path, you never with these things.  It is a big decision for her life, after all, since it will take over the next two years of her life and take her out to Louisiana.

At this point in our lives, a lot of what we’re going through is all about growing apart.  If she chooses to go through with this, my best friends and I will be spread out between states in the Midwest, South, and West Coast.  Even if she doesn’t go for this, she is interested in moving to D.C., so we’d still be in three very different regions of the country.  This is also assuming that I will make it back to the states by then!

Today I went to a workshop on facilitation and how the International Association of Facilitators emphasizes process-driven versus content-driven facilitation.  Basically what that means that going in as a facilitator, you are not a consultant who provides advice.  Instead you stay neutral and just ask the right questions to get people in the group to talk about the right things for the purposes of that discussion.

The issue of divergence was brought up as a concept for how these sessions work; first you brainstorm and get the contributions from individuals, which is the diverging component.  After you all those little pieces, you parse through and converge again at a point where the group reaches a consensus on the answer or solution they were looking for.  I found this an interesting way of wording it that I had not encountered before.

Oh the parallels in life.