First week of Training

I just had to pause for a second and think whether tomorrow would be the third or the fourth day of training...the days are so long (tomorrow is the third). Yesterday we arrived at the NOLA (a.k.a. New Orleans Louisiana) office at 8 and drove an hour or so to Baton Rouge where we sat in a small room, classroom-style, without air-conditioning, the entire day. We had to listen to the history of city-year during the first half of the day, and the second half we had to read through chapters in the "Idealist Manual" that we were supposed to have read the night before (I'm glad I didn't know we had to read them). The one thing I did learn was that the program was started after failed attempts at lobbying for mandatory civil-service in the US, which is interesting because I had stated that I believe in mandatory civil-service when I was interviewed. Perhaps that got me the job... :D
Today was a little better; we didn't have to be at work until 8: 15, and training was in NOLA instead, so we also didn't have to endure the long car ride (we will again on Friday, at 6 in the morning...yay.) We started training with a leader-ship directions workshop, where we were given different personality clusters associated with North, S, E, W, and had to talk about their pros and cons. I identified as a South: caring about reaching compromise, satisfying everyone, people's feelings being more important than goals etc. I noticed that my group was both the smallest, compromised of only 4 people, and the only one that was entirely female. Really, I saw traits of everyone I knew of in all of the directions, but there are definitely tendencies. It was quite amusing because both Stephanie and I are quite quintessentially out direction, and we made jokes about our demonstrations of our typical behavior, (she is West, very organized and doesn't think outside the box easily...it was especially amusing that each of the four housemates identified themselves as a different direction. we have a well balanced house!)
We then did confrontation exercises, and yet another lecture on the history of Americorps and then finally lunch...In the afternoon the most interesting activity was learning details of the various programs. I'm leaving it up to fate what team I'm on, because while I think it would be most natural for me to be immersed in the entirely in-school program, based around tutoring and after school programs, I know that I would be challenged in ways that I need to be challenged if I participated in the other program because it would force me to organize projects and actively learn the nitty-gritty of organizing a non-profit organization. My conscience is pushing me to the latter, but I'll let them decide.
And that's all for now.
Cheers!
K