Wrapping Up My Service Learning Experience With One Final Session

Greetings,

Today (5/4/15) was my last day at my service learning project!  I’m not sure how I feel about this.  Sure I’m excited to be done get onto my summer schedule, but at the same time, I will thoroughly miss these Monday afternoons.  I didn’t know what to expect when signing myself up for volunteering at an inner city MPS school, but I have been pleasantly surprised every step of the way and consider myself a better person because of it.

For 10 weeks I spent about 2 hours on Monday afternoons at Bradley Tech High School in the Gear Up Program through the Boys and Girls Club.  This program, which was started because of a grant awarded to the MPS, is intended to help a few years of students receive the extra attention and training they need to reach new heights and ultimately go to college and be better prepared for life.  Until volunteering for this program, I had not heard of such programs, but I think they are a phenomenal idea.  I only wish every student had access to this wonderful support network! 

The students that I grew to know and tutor were your normal everyday high school students.  I say that because some days it was hard to get them motivated and that was the last place they wanted to be after putting in a full day at school.  However, other days, these students took advantage of this time and worked with myself and other tutors on their various homework assignments.  From English to Math to Spanish, whatever they had questions with, we did our best to support and help them out.  I think this is where we truly make a difference.  It might not seem like much at first, but week in and week out answering questions and giving them extra 1 on 1 support, they have been able to make some incredible strides and are already thinking about college as sophomores.  This is excellent!

Today I helped a female with student with Spanish.  She talked at length to the program director about how difficult her Spanish teacher was making it for everyone in the class.  Apparently his method of teaching is not cutting it and students are not getting the feedback they need to get better.  As I was listening to this, I frowned!  Spanish and taking a foreign language in general is one of the most challenging things a student can do.  And getting feedback and learning from your mistakes is a crucial!  I could tell she was feeling overwhelmed and ready to give up (failing the class), so I sat down and began to review one of the past tenses (preterite).  The program director tried to tell her that you need to know all the words in spanish and what they mean in order to do well.  I disagreed and when I sat down with her, I said that you have to be good at guessing.  There is so much vocab that you are never going to know all the words in the sentence.  Even I don’t after 10+ years of learning!  What you have to get good at is guessing and reading the context.  If you are learning the past tense and specifically the preterite, don’t worry about the sentence after the verb, focus on the context to determine the subject and form of the verb.  Then using your charts which you have wrote down on your paper (I really encouraged her to do this), go to the appropriate form.  I could tell she was hesitant at first and after a slow start, she stopped making mistakes and did every example I threw at her correctly!  Sometimes narrowing down your focus and looking at the smaller picture (context for subject and verb conjugation ending), it can make a world of difference.

I will miss these students and hope they continue to work hard because I know they can succeed if they really want too.  And who knows, for my final 2 light semesters (< 12 credits), maybe I just might find a few extra hours to return and pick up where I left volunteering and tutoring these bright young students.

You never know! :)

Sincerely,

Ross

Finals Approaching – Only One More Week of Tutoring!

                Hello everyone.  It looks like I will be writing one more blog after this one to talk about my final tutoring adventure after next week’s session.  It’s crazy to think that this was my second to last time (4/26).  I remember thinking before the semester and being worried about how I was going to be able to manage this volunteer requirement, but now I laugh at those thoughts.  I think I told myself you only have to be there an hour a week and you can sneak out and get back to your college schedule.  Interestingly enough, now I find myself staying for the entire 2 hours!  It’s funny how things change haha.

                This past Monday I tutored a female student in Spanish and math!  I was definitely more excited to help with Spanish, but of course, we decided to do math first.  Being an engineering major, I consider myself fairly competent in math, however, when I was helping her I found myself googling the answers.  I have never had to do this before (at least during tutoring)!  She was working on proofs and proving that a certain polygon ABCD is a parallelogram and that certain interior angles are congruent.  When I first saw it, I was baffled and didn’t even know where to start.  The last time I did proofs of polygons was back in high school and I remember not liking them.  That just goes to show you how useful that material is if it’s used once in 7-8 years and how often you use it, but that’s another story… Any ways, using google, I was able to explain the answers and work through a few proofs with her step by step.  I’m hoping by explaining it to her, it will begin to make sense what steps and what things you should look for when developing your proof.  I also reassured her that once you get through this material, you will never have to use it again.  She seemed to like that!

                The second hour or so we focused on Spanish and the present progressive.  Thankfully as hard as Spanish can be when starting off, the present progressive follows a simple formula that is easy to remember to use.  The present progressive is the form you use when you talk about someone doing something or in the midst of something.  She is running.  I’m eating.  They are watching TV.  In English, this commonly done by adding –ing to the verb.  In Spanish, the verb estar is used for is/are along with the verb + ando/iendo depending on if it is ar or er/ir.  So if it’s yo _____________ (hablar) con acento Americano, the completion of the sentence would be yo estoy hablando con acento Americano.  So estar is conjugated and the verb has an ando or iendo ending.  How I explained this to her was that estar is conjugated normally as any other verb.  So you have to look for context and the “who” of the sentence.  Next, you take the verb and chop of the ending.  So hablar becomes habl…  Then since hablar ends in –ar, you need to add ando.  If it ended in er/ir, you would need to add iendo.  So if the subject is me (yo) the sentence would be yo estoy hablando.  I drew a few charts on the side of her paper so she could follow the pattern.  After the first few attempts, she really started getting a hang of it!  That was fun to see.  But like all Spanish things, writing it is one thing and speaking is another.  So of course I made her practice speaking these words.  Now the ending can get tricky with this new addition and become a mouthful, but she also seemed to pick up on it pretty quick.  If it’s mouthful, just say it slower.  You can work on your speed later.

                That’s it for me this week!  Until next week.

--Ross

Tutoring Near the Finish Line

It’s hard to believe that it is almost May!  Where has the semester gone?  It feels like a blur at this point.  It was the busiest semester of my college career, but also the most fulfilling.  It’s really awesome to see how you can take on a daunting challenge and do well; it really makes you feel good inside knowing all the hard work is paying off.  One of my commitments this semester that has really changed my perspective on life has been tutoring at Bradley Tech High School.  It doesn’t seem like much, having only visited on Monday’s, but already I have visited the school 8 times and will try to squeeze in a few more before final exams.  I think the only word to describe my experience is WOW.  I didn’t know what to expect when signing up to tutor in an inner city Milwaukee school where I became part of the racial minority, but I have been pleasantly surprised at every turn and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

                Not only has this experience helped enhance
my tutoring skills, I feel more confident and comfortable working with people of many different backgrounds.  Some days as a tutor your patience can be tested.  Whether the students were thinking about spring break, the nice weather, or were busy texting, sometimes it was hard to get them motivated.  In these cases, I did as much as I could to get the ball rolling and then let them decide.  I came to the conclusion that if they don’t want to work, I can’t make them work or make them learn, they have to decide that for themselves.  Another thing I have noticed is that repetition combined is essential.  As mentioned in a previous blog entry, they sometimes don’t pick up on patterns as quick as you would think they would, but if you show it to them enough times, it finally starts to click.  You can’t take offense that they might not be learning much from you the first time through, so you just have to keep going and continue showing as many different ways as possible.  This is huge for Math!

               Today I was helping a student with Parallelograms.  She had to find the missing lengths, which were comprised of just a variable or a variable with a math operation.  She had most of the worksheet completed, but needed a little help with some tougher ones.  It was interesting to me because she already knew how to do them (the tough problems).  She was telling me that the certain sides equaled each other.  I agreed and then told her to write that down on the paper.  At first she wrote it down wrong by placing a minus sign in between the two math operations.  I told her to take a step back and then reminded her what she said earlier when she said they were equal.  So instead of a minus sign, I said put in an equal sign in between the two lengths.  Then she was like ohhhh and then I can solve for x by algebra.  Exactly!  Sometimes all you need is that little extra push to get things to click.

                These kids are very lucky to be in the Gear Up program.  In hindsight you always wish you could do something different.  I say this because some of the kids in the program treat going to these afterschool homeworkathons as a chore and do everything they can to not do homework.  Years from now, I bet the ones that didn’t take advantage of this amazing opportunity to have 1on1 help will wish they did.  But they are young and want to have fun!  School sucks at this age, it’s the last thing they want to do.  I think I was the same way… I find it interesting to reflect on how similar I was to some of these kids.

Maybe I will get time to post one more blog before final exams!

Until then, signing off.

--Ross

Getting into the swing of things, tutoring at Bradley Tech!

Greetings everyone,

It has been a while since my last post!  Since my first 2 tutoring sessions in February and another 3 in March, I can officially say that I am now into the swing of things!  It's been a very interesting journey so far and having worked with multiple students on spanish and math with a wide range of skills, yet I look forward to the challenge every week.

I want to first go into a little more about Bradley Tech.  It is a trade school and really pushes for the development and mastery of multiple tech skills.  I think this is a really neat idea because we now know that not everyone is meant for college and many people need to fill trade roles in the automative, metal, welding, and carpentry industries.

Now from the moment I walk up to the front doors, the experience from this high school is completely different from my own.  The doors are locked and I need to get buzzed in.  After walking through the doors, I precede to the metal detector and xray scanner which I can now bypass because I am a tutor.  From there, it's off to the Boys and Girls Club study rooms which are either on the first floor or second floor.  Often times security has to let me through another set of locked doors.  This can be slightly challenging when they are not around... The most different part for me is that I have yet to see a white student at the school.  Since I came from a high school with little diversity that was relatively safe and had minimal security, I feel like I'm always walking into a highly secure complex at Bradley Tech, yet this is a normal high school with normal students.  I had to bring this up because my high school experience was so much different and plain.  It's very interesting to observe how different it can be only 180 miles away...

Back to tutoring, I have really enjoyed helping the students on their homework, whether it is Math or Spanish.  I can honestly tell that these students are here to learn and get better.  They are making the commitment and putting in the effort everyday by coming to this program and it's making a difference.  Just the other day helping a student with the pythagorean theroem and indentifying right triangles, she mentioned she wished the teacher had more time to go over this and more detail.  She was so happy because after going through a few examples with me, it made sense to her.  This is really a gratifying experience.  However, it makes me wonder about the current education system in general.  We set such rigiourous standards to help make sure our students are prepared for the next level, but what's the benefit when it is so rushed that students don't have the time to fully grasp it?  And when they fall so far behind that they give up or fail at the next level, what good did going that fast in the first place do?

It's also been a great learning experience for me.  Not only do I get to help these students, I also get to work with and know talent students of different ethnicities and races that I normally never would have crossed paths with.  This is super exciting!  I also am learning to be very patient, because as an engineer and spanish minor, not everyone picks up on the pattern and relationships shown on paper as fast as I do.  When to me it seems obvious, to them, they are still so new at it, it hasn't clicked yet.  I think this is a very useful skill to learn and practice as it forces me to explain things in different ways and take different approaches.

With that, I'm signing off.  I am very much looking forward to the rest of my tutoring sessions in April and May!  I will be sad to see the end of May come around and the conclusion of this service learning experience.

Ross

Bradley Tech High School – Gear Up Program Mentor - The Beginning

I am proud to say that I have 2 Monday’s of after school tutoring under my belt!  I was a little worried about making the weekly commitment due to other responsibilities and going beyond the scope of the project, but now I already find myself looking forward to these afternoons.  I know it’s going to be a good semester helping out these high school students.

Let’s back up a few steps.  I am currently a mentor/after school tutor for a select group of high school students at Bradley Tech as part of a Gear Up initiative that the school received a grant for.  This program is running large part due to the efforts of the Boys & Girls Club.  Thank you.

On the first day, as I walked into the high school, I was shocked by its modernity!  I immediately thought how cool it would be to go to school here.  Maybe it’s the engineer in me, but seeing lots of concrete, steel, and exposed mechanical elements of the building, it gave off some very techy and cool vibes.  I can’t imagine how this might help or inspire some of the students there!

Being an engineering student, I originally thought I would be helping out with math, but it turns out, the past few Monday’s I have been helping students with do Spanish review and homework.  I think I secretly like tutoring Spanish more because it’s so different than math problems and not only do I get review the key basics, I also get to speak it and work on my pronunciation.  And as an older student who took these same early Spanish classes years ago in High School, it’s been fun looking back to see what they are doing in class.  Ironically, I remember having the exact same struggles as they are having.  I guess some things never change haha.

I have helped 2 kids so far.  I’m really looking forward to working with these two individuals the rest of the semester going forward in addition to meeting others.  I know I will be learning new things every week and hopefully they can learn a thing or two as well.

Hasta pronto! :) Adios!

Ross