A couple times now I feel I’ve said that working with the kids all day leaves me exhausted. It’s a good feeling and it’s very rewarding…most of the time.
That feeling depends on how the day in the classroom went. I have been spending a lot of time these past two weeks “teaching” the second grade class. Their teacher is also the school’s Creative Arts teacher and frequently is double-booked (which seems like poor scheduling, but there may be no other way). So Class Two will often be without a teacher. And since I am working with several of the second grade kids on their reading and have a close working relationship with their teacher, it has worked out for me to fill in for him when conflicts come up, which is at least once every day.
And when I say “teach,” I put it in quotation marks because I am not doing a whole lot of imparting of knowledge. Either I help them review what they’ve been working on in math (adding and subtracting three-digit numbers), which many of them struggle with. Or we do spelling games. The first day I did this with them, I divided them into three teams (there are three rows of desks in the cramped classroom) and gave each team a name. On a whim, I called them New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The names stuck. Now even their regular teacher uses those team names. I think the kids like anything that references the US. Many of their exercise books have President Obama’s picture on it. It’s always either him or Asamoah Gyn or other famous football players. Whatever it takes to get kids excited about learning, right?
Anyways, my point here was that I haven’t been developing lesson plans or helping them learn more in the classroom, which is a shame. And with the discipline problems I talked about before, much of the time is chaotic and small fights break out. I try to manage it the best I can and all of it is good experience being in front of a classroom. I can’t say I’m doing well at it, so I chalk it up to positive experiences that I can build on down the road.
But tutoring is going well. In the one-on-ones, the kids are very respectful and eager to learn. We usually attract a small crowd of on-lookers, many of whom are high-performing students who feel a little left out and want to practice their ABCs with me, despite the fact that they are strong readers. When I first started, the observers would frequently blert out answers as soon as my tutee got stuck. Now we’ve gotten a good understanding of my expectations and newcomers are reminded by their peers that they have to keep quiet. In practice, it doesn’t work perfectly but I’m glad the kids respect me and my efforts to help them learn one-on-one.
And each of my tutees has shown some marginal progress. It ranges from Daniel in second grade, who today successfully identified all but three letters on the first try, including his notorious foe, the letter “L.” Then there are two first grade boys I have been working with who have embraced phonics and gone from working on the sounds letters make to going through Dr. Suess books. So that is all encouraging and usually leaves me feeling good about my impact, often in contrast to my time in front of the classroom. I love the kids in Class Two, but I really can’t control them and frequently lose my patience.
I’m really glad I have been able to build strong bonds with these great kids in such a short amount of time. At school, I regularly find eager kids tugging at my wrists trying to drag me with them to work on reading. And people recognize me around the community – not just as ‘obruni’ but as ‘Mr. David,’ which makes me feel good that I have entered the lives of these people and hopefully will be remembered here. Kids constantly ask me if I know the past WPE volunteers who have been here. They rattle off the names and some I know and some I don’t. They remember everyone who has come through here and tried to help better their education. It shows what a big impression each of them made on these kids and I’m really thankful to be a part of that legacy as well as make individual impacts on the children I’m working with.
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