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
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