River of Stars

First day of Americorps job

October 12, 2010 at 6:10 am (Americorps, Teaching)

I’m going to be working part-time for Americorps, mentoring a caseload of five youth at Edna Brewer Middle School: 

(I’ll probably take some better pictures over the course of this week)

My fellow Americorps team members and I still don’t know what kids we’re assigned to mentor/tutor yet, so we just took a tour of the campus, met some of the staff and faculty, and then split up to observe the afterschool programs.

Well, I say observed, but the afterschool instructor whose classroom I was in asked me to help some of the kids with their homework.  I went over some math problems with two girls and tested two boys on their spelling in preparation for an upcoming test. Reminded me a little of my time as a writing tutor at UCSC.

I’m a little uncertain about how things are going to go in the future, because the kids we’ll be working with closely will have 1.0 GPAs or lower, and obviously have serious issues, but the school seems to have an overall positive vibe that should help immensely. For example, I noticed some Chinese writing in the notebook of one of the girls I’d helped, and asked her about it. She said she was learning it from her Chinese friend because she wants to be mayor of Oakland one day and needs to be able to get the Asian vote. This level of cooperation and motivation appears fairly commonplace at Edna Brewer, so hopefully we’ll be able to help instill the same values in the students who have been struggling.