The Easley Center has four bookshelves in the small tutoring room, mostly filled with "reference" books and novels that 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 bookstores, especially given their rugged, worn quality. There were three encyclopedia series and a couple of dictionaries as well, but I couldn’t even remember the last time I opened an encyclopedia or even thought about using one. I found the reading materials they had interesting and quite representative of the amount of help these kids probably received in school. Many times, they would have some questions based on a reading they did, but not the reading, and it would be because the teacher didn’t make copies for them, or they didn’t get to bring their books home because the school didn’t have enough. So I would struggle through trying to help them answer the questions on their homework, but there were some I simply couldn’t help with because I didn’t have the materials to do so. I can only imagine how much harder it would be for their parents, who maybe didn’t receive much higher education, to try to help them with their homework when they don’t even have all the information required to do so!
The small space used for the tutoring room is also representative of the level of importance placed on doing schoolwork, because there’s a room that’s at least twice as large that is used as a ping pong/gaming room just across the lobby from the tutoring room. The small room is cramped, filled with three large tables and a metal teacher’s desk and as many metal folding chairs as they can fit. There’s a TV on a cart that never gets used, two storage cabinets that have some craft supplies and other random items, four bookshelves decked with dozens of virtually useless novels, and a collection of junk that didn’t seem to fit in the tutoring room, much less at the center. Obviously it’s expected that not many kids will do their homework, or the room would be larger; they also don’t expect the kids to stay long, because in just half an hour I can feel parts of my body going asleep from the awkward positions I have to seat myself in just to fit all of myself in the small space I’m given. The repeated crossing lines on the windows, gray walls, and fluorescent lights make the room feel more like a prison than a space for learning, and I find myself wondering when I can get out of there, just waiting for most of the kids to be done with their homework and hoping for just one of them to ask me to play with them. Pathetic, right? Sometimes I feel like I’m back in grade school, just waiting for class to be over so I can go play. No wonder the kids feel the same way.
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