Program LIVES Weeks 14 & 15 Recap

Welcome back to the Program LIVES weekly recap blog!! Tikkun Long Island apologizes for the delay in posting these latest entries. The below blogs will discuss the sessions held on May 7 and 14!

Week 14 - May 7, 2015

This week we covered a lot of different topics with the program participants. We started with summer plans as the end of the high school year is only a month away. Some participants will be taking summer classes while others will be looking for work. Discussed was the challenge of finding summer work and where the best places to look are. We also discussed the challenges of summer classes and how the workload can be intense as classes are expected to be completed in short periods of time.

After our initial discussion about summer plans, the group engaged in a throughful discussion about sexuality and whether sexuality is a choice or something that you are born with. This discussion was proposed by one of the group participants and it was an excellent topic to converse about. We discussed the science around sexuality and we also discussed how to have conversations such as this one in a mature, respectful way.

The last topic that we discussed was fighting, specifically in high school. A few group participants had experienced fights in the weeks prior and we thought it would be a good time to discuss the topic. We spoke with the group about how to avoid fights, what to do if you think a fight will occur, etc. We spoke about the serious consequences and how they can lead to issues outside of school. Very often fights in school continue beyond the school grounds and once fighting occurs outside of the school grounds, you deal with the police instead of teachers and principals. It was a very important discussion to have and we hope that our participants can avoid these situations in the future.

Week 15 - May 14, 2015

The topic of this week was anger management. All of our program participants at one time or another have expressed having problems controlling their anger. We are aware that an inability to control anger can put people in tough situations. Our goal is to mentor each and every person in the program and teaching our participants how to control their anger is extremely important. Everyone at Tikkun Long Island has worked with the T.A.S.T.E. program. The T.A.S.T.E. program is a program for those who have committed low level misdemeanors or violations. It is a program that helps its participants take responsibility for their actions. One thing we've noticed in the T.A.S.T.E. program is that almost everyone there has some issues with anger management. We want to make sure no one from Program LIVES ends up in the T.A.S.T.E. program therefore covering anger management now, as opposed to when they get arrested and sent to the T.A.S.T.E. program, is key.

Anger management dominated most of the session but we did leave some time for planning the following week's (tonight's) session. We are going to take the group participants to Belmont Park. Stay tuned for a recap of our trip!