By the time I arrived at 4:00 pm to tutor at Easley, almost all the kids were either playing in the sunlight or inside. One of the other tutors was having to focus solely on a student to help them with their homework, so I sat down between a couple of students to be available in case they needed me. They had occasional questions concerning their homework, but mostly I got to talk with and get to know them.
I noticed the books on the bookshelf, and how there were three different encyclopedia series and a couple of dictionaries, but all the other "reference" books and novels seemed unrelated to anything the students would ever learn about, having strangely specific and prestigious titles about the development of birds, or a novel involving a forbidden love. It seemed that they were perhaps gathered from garage sales and super sales at old book stores, especially given their rugged, worn quality. I thought about the disadvantage these kids, and this tutoring center, were at by not having all the resources that would help them most in school, and wondered if any of the books were ever used or had even been opened.
I realized that one of the girls was asking me a question, so I pulled myself from my thoughts and turned my attention to her. She asked a question, something involving grammar and correcting improper sentences, and was wondering if the word they'd used in the sentence was correct. It's strange how things line up sometimes. I replied that the way I liked to find out was by using the dictionary, so I pulled one from the shelf and turned to the "p's." I handed it to her and told her to look up the word on the page and see if the definition fits the sentence. She found it, read the definition aloud, then read the sentence and inserted the definition where the word was. "No," she said, almost immediately, "that word doesn't work." "Ok," I said, "what word does fit?" She replied with the proper vocabulary word, and I told that she did a good job and that it's good to use a dictionary anytime you're unsure if a word fits in a sentence. She thanked me, then continued on with her homework. Hopefully the dictionary will be opened again.
Later she talked about the rate of the schools, and told me that she was at the second best school in Nashville. She's in the ninth grade. A boy in the room looked embarrassed when she mentioned the line up, and another boy explained that he was at the "dumb school." I told him no school was a dumb school because any school is good for learning, and he replied with a half-hearted "sorry" and a snicker. The girl seemed proud of herself for getting into the second best school, but had already decided that there were some colleges she couldn't go to because she wasn't smart enough to get in. Magnet schools seem like a good idea, with the purpose that the kids who are farther along in school or want to challenge themselves can without having to go to private school, but I realized throughout the interaction the kids had that there were some negatives. Being at the second smartest school encouraged her to work hard and made school a serious priority for her, but the kid who was at the school on the lowest rung seemed to have decided that school was unimportant at a very early age (he was in the sixth grade) and that he didn't need to try because he would never go to a four-year college. So are we supporting and encouraging the development of the kids who really want to excel at school, or are we telling kids, as early as the sixth grade, that they don't need to try because they aren't good enough?
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