We again had an attendance problem this week in our rehearsal. Instead of all five of our students being there we were down to two. However, we found that this was extremely helpful as the two students who were in attendance, Khalil and Adrian, were those who needed the most practice. In the instance of Khalil, I felt as though we really had a productive week in getting him motivated about coming to rehearsal and the show in general. A mere few weeks ago, Khalil refused to read his lines and would frequently make excuses as to why he had to miss part or all of rehearsal. However, this week after we did an initial run through of our opening scene in which the director of Youth life was present (high pressure), we decided to split Khalil and Adrian up individually to work on particular facets of their characters. Dylan and I were paired up with Khalil, while TJ was paired up with Adrian. Our run through of lines and description of the character with Khalil was rather brief considering he is only playing the minor roles of Antonio and Sir Toby Belch. However, after we ran through our lines, Dylan and I fielded many questions from Khalil regarding our personal backgrounds and life in college. In our discussion, we learned a lot about Khalil and his eventual ambitions to attend either the University of Oregon or the University of Richmond. Granted, he is only in 7th grade, so he still has a while to make his college decision. This discussion that we had with Khalil was one of the pinnacles of my experience with rehearsals thus far, and really gave me a chance to take a step back and realize the importance of a mentor to a younger student. I truly hope that we have more talks like this with Khalil because for one, he seemed to be very receptive to Dylan and I’s openness. As a result, after our discussion, he read his lines more confidently and with more purpose as opposed to before. In addition, I think that our conversation with Khalil will help him in finding motivation to work hard in school. Moving forward, I look forward to hopefully connecting to more of our students as we did with Khalil this week.