Final Service Learning Reflection #1

My literacy experience is similar to the experience these kids are experiencing, because some of them attend schools with teachers that don’t like their jobs, don’t care if the students learn or not, and are only concerned with the extracurricular activities they’re involved in.  I’m from a small farming town in the southwest corner of Missouri, where FFA (Future Farmers of America) is the biggest club, and Home Economics is the most important class.  There was a select group of kids that cared about their education and wanted to go to college, and I was part of that group, but the vast majority of kids took off school or only went to school for half of the day so they could farm with their family.  The kids at Easley might not be farmers, and they might not know a farmer, but football, basketball, and stepping are easily the most important parts of school for both them and their teachers.  College isn’t just a dream, it’s not even a thought that passes through anyone’s mind—except the kids at magnet schools.  The division that existed at my school between farmers and future college students exists at Easley between “dumb school kids” and “magnet school kids,” and it’s incredibly sad.

The main differences I noticed are the presence of magnet schools; I didn’t even know what a magnet school was until I took this course, and when I first heard about it, I thought that it would’ve been a great opportunity for me in school.  Be solely around people that want to learn and go to college, and the kids who don’t desire that can go to a school that focuses more on vocational classes.  However, I very quickly realized that this division helps out the magnet school kids, but ruins any hopes or desires the “dumb school kids” might have had for going to college.  Their chances of going to college are ruined before they even enter high school; at least at my high school, if someone decided their junior or senior year to suddenly care about school and try to go to college, they had the classes and opportunities available to try.  If a “dumb school kid” were to decide to try to go to college, they would have no chance, because the school they go to is not for college bound kids.  This affects their desire to study, and it shows when I tutor them.  And as I’m tutoring them, I can’t help but think, “Who ruined your zest for life, the desire for learning you could’ve had?”  And when I try to tell them that they’re smart, that they can figure out the answer on their own, they look at me as if to say, “No, I can’t.  You know I can’t.  I don’t even know how to try.”  And the defeat in their faces breaks my heart, because they’re so young, and they have their whole lives ahead of them, and already they’ve decided… it’s over.

Digital Storyboard

Easley Escapades #7 and 8

On Thursday I spent most of my time trying to encourage the kids to do their work, do it themselves, and do it well.  Usually after encouraging them a couple of times they're fine and will do the work so they can go play.  But that day we were having a particularly hard time getting them to be motivated to do work.  And the sad thing is, I wasn't terribly motivated to do work either, so that made it even more difficult to motivate them.  But after a little over an hour, the girl I was tutoring finally finished her homework, and it appeared that there wasn't anything left for me to do in the tutoring room.  There were three tutors there already and three kids, and one of them was an older girl who said she didn't need help with her homework, so really there were three tutors for two kids.  I thought having a two-to-one tutor-to-student ratio would be a little over the top, so when the girl I'd been tutoring asked me to go play with her, I agreed.

We played four square after she convinced some other kids to join us, and I quickly learned that four square had changed a lot since I was a kid.  They had things separate from just bouncing the ball into each other's squares; now there was something called "cherry bomb", where you had to jump out of the playing square.  If you were the last person to jump out, you were out of the game and the next person in line joined in.  Also, if the "king" or "queen" said "bus stop" and put their foot in a certain place on any line in the playing square, everyone else had to run up and put their foot in the same spot.  Again, if you were the last person to get your foot right next to the "king" or "queen's," you were out.  The "king" or "queen" could yell any of these things at any point when the ball was not in play, and they did so quite frequently.  Sometimes multiple times in a row, alternating between "cherry bombs" and "bus stops."  Personally, I found the extra running around completely exhausting.  However, the kids seemed exhilarated and energized by it, and often wound up rolling on the floor laughing (literally) either because of someone falling, someone being last and getting upset about it, or from the sheer enjoyment of playing the game.  And soon, I felt young again.  Someone would tell me I was out, and I would quickly give my rebuttal of why I wasn't out.  Whenever I caught myself doing this I would quickly straighten up, cease arguing, and state that I was out and step back in line, reminding myself that I was an adult now, and this was just a silly little game that didn't really matter.  Furthermore, I had real-life, adult things to worry about, and couldn't afford to waste my energies on child's play.

Oh how quickly the good die young.

Easley Escapade #6

At the Easley Center on Thursday I mostly spent my time tutoring and getting to know the kids I was tutoring.  There was one little boy in particular who was six years old, just in the first grade, and he asked me for help with his homework fifteen minutes before my shift was up.  I agreed to help him because he was working on learning to write/spell out basic words, so I figured it wouldn't take terribly long.  As we worked through the assignment, he would point to the picture, say what it was rather enthusiastically (apple!), then start to spell it.  After each letter he looked up at me for approval and once I nodded or said, "Yes, that's right," he would beam with pride and carefully draw the letter in the oversized blank (with dashes in the middle to distinguish upper case from lower case, of course).  Sometimes he would look up and say questioningly, "t?" (or whatever letter it was), searching my face for an answer with his large brown eyes.  I would either commend him or make the sound of the letter it was supposed to be ("puh, puh, puh, puh, puh"), and then he would say, a little more confidently, "p?!" and I would reply with a yes or a no, providing him with more clues if necessary.

He was an adorable little boy, but all I could think the whole time was that he was at the beginning of his life, and there was no telling where it would go.  Really, there never is any way to know how anyone's life will go.  And for a moment, his innocent joy seemed indescribably sad to me, because I knew that someday someone would try to take that away from him, and they might be successful, and he would know that for the rest of his life he would have to watch out for himself, perhaps by himself.

But each time he smiled at me I couldn't help but think that his joy was a beautiful gift to all those around him, and that for a little while, his zest for learning for the pure sake of knowing would inspire, encourage, and bring joy to everyone he meets.  So perhaps that childlike innocence; that love for life, every moment of it; becoming excited over the smallest of things, is really a blessing meant for us adults in the world.  Maybe, instead of feeling the need to educate the child and bring them back to "reality," we should take the opportunity to remember what that felt like and enjoy that sweet innocence that lasts for that short period of time.  The adults may be here to help the children grow up, but the children are here to remind the grown ups what life was like in the beginning, what it was meant to be, and that sometimes you can beam with joy over learning something simple, like how to write the word "apple."

Digital Short

Part of the ethnographic study we're doing is creating a digital short that addresses one aspect of our projects.  For mine, I'm using the headline "they're just like us" to develop the concept that even homeless people are "normal" people too, or at least "were" at one time.  My plan is to use a combination of audio from the interviews I had with homeless people and Belmont students, some instrumental background music, video from the sites where I interviewed the homeless people, and some images of homelessness/homeless communities available from Google Images.  I'm debating using a screen shot from the online homeless forum (mentioned in a previous post) of a question I posted and the responses I received.  I will need to determine if it really fits with what I'm trying to convey via this short.

Specifically, I'm going to use the interview clips that include questions pertaining to how homeless people were raised vs. how Belmont students watched their parents treat homeless people (when they were raised).  The first clip I'll play, probably with no visuals or the background music (though if I do visuals, it will be of a kid who looks spoiled), is Saw (a homeless person I interviewed) saying that he was a spoiled kid growing up, in order to relate him to the Belmont students.  Then I'll start the music/video of homeless people and continue the interview clips.

The purpose behind showing the sites where I interviewed the homeless people is to show a number of things:  1) these sites are less than five minutes away from Belmont, 2) they are areas most Belmont students drive past several times a week, 3) they're very "normal" areas with plenty of "normal" people around (therefore, why can't the homeless people also be considered "normal?"), and 4) to show the number of people that drive past without helping those begging.

I hope that this digital short will take away the veil that seems to exist over "normal" people's eyes, and once existed over mine, to help them to be able to see that homeless people are people too.  They aren't rodents, pests, or people who are intruding on our "normal" lives.  They're people, with a past, a life, and hope for the future (sometimes).  They deserve to live, and live well, too.

Easley Escapade #5

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?

Easley Escapades #3 & 4

From the moment I walked into the after school center yesterday, the kids were more rowdy and antsy than I remembered from my previous visit.  I realized pretty quickly that with all the rain we had had that day, the kids probably didn't get to go outside a lot or at all, and if they did they probably couldn't play on all the equipment.  Oh dear.  This was going to be a long day.

It reminded me of my years in grade school, and all the recesses I had, and how they would make rules about where you could or couldn't play when it rains so that you don't get mud all over yourself-- not that you really care, you just love the feeling of freedom for that brief thirty minutes.  When I'm around kids in school, especially grade school, I immediately begin to have flashbacks about my time in grade school.  My experience was different in some ways, but similar in others, as the kids at the center.  But mostly, all I can think is that they're just kids, and I remember how simple life was back then (not that I thought it was simple, I had serious issues back then, like birthday parties and what presents I wanted for Christmas).  And then I think back to all the teachers and "older kids" that had an impact on my life, and it scares me because I think, "That's me.  Right now.  Everything I do, everything I say, these kids are paying attention to.  And ultimately, they may remember quite well the college student from Belmont that used to come and help them with their homework; I know I remember a lot of people from my younger years who probably didn't realize the significant impact they had on my life, even just a memory."  So for a brief second, I get afraid.  I worry.  I watch my actions more than usual.  And then, I start interacting with the kids, and I am reminded that no matter what I say or do, even if they remember, these kids are young and innocent, with fresh minds and ideas.  They are impressionable, but so am I.  I'll remember my experience with them just as much as they will theirs with me, and that's the beauty of getting involved in others' lives:  what goes around comes around.  These kids are making an impact on me.

So what did I learn today?  Grade school homework is hard, and I don't think I use half of what they're teaching these kids in math and english.  I didn't know what an appository was, and I was also pretty positive that the kids didn't need to in order to succeed in life or even go to college.  But it's all about assignments and grades, so I did my best to look back at their lessons, be vulnerable enough to ask them questions (disguising it as assessing their knowledge of the subject), and try to figure it out with them.  There were a couple of girls, however, who didn't want to read their assignment.  They wanted me to tell them the answers to the questions.  What they didn't realize, though, is that I hadn't read the assignment either, so I didn't even know the answers.  But that was beyond the point; I had to try to teach them a lesson in the importance of reading for class (don't I know that as a college student).  So they batted their little eyes and tried to charm me into doing their homework for them, but I stood my ground.  Next they threw tantrums; I threatened time out (these girls were far too old for time out).  Eventually, though, I wore them down, and grudgingly they sat down, read the assignment, then filled out the answers.  They gave me their homework to check, and their answers were excellent.  I told them so, but they didn't seem pleased at all.  They were still frustrated with me.  See, they're smart girls; that's not the problem.  I think the problem is the two methods they tried with me worked one time with someone, and they remembered and held onto that with the idea that it would work again.

Wow, what an impact someone had on their life.  These kids really are impressionable and, even if subconsciously, they will remember everything about my visit:  my authority, my demeanor, my helpfulness, and my appearance.  Maybe she'll remember the girl who made her read her assignment, and that same girl told her she was smart and had excellent answers because she did her homework properly.  Maybe.  But most importantly, the words I say to them and my actions will be seared in their minds forever.  What an awesome opportunity.  The question for me, though, is:  can I handle this?  Twenty kids for an hour or two a few days?  Whether I can or not, I have to.  So take a deep breath, and go in there.  Welcome to adulthood.