So, I’m not really sure how to feel in recent weeks about this school volunteering thing that I’m doing. I don’t know that it’s really going all that well…though maybe it’s not as big a deal as I tend to make of it?
The first couple weeks, it actually seemed to go really well; I felt like I had a role to play and like I was actually able to be useful. These last few weeks, though, a lot of the time I’ve felt like my presence has just been kind of irrelevant. How much of this is my own fault and how much is the fault of the teacher (and now the student teacher who has largely taken the class over from the regular teacher) is hard to say. I mean, it’s not like the class is fundamentally about me—but I ended up in this classroom because the teacher spoke up and said she could use a volunteer, so I am scratching my head a little bit after several weeks of there not seeming to be much for me to do. Or would a less timid and more outgoing person in my situation be taking more initiative to carve out a role for himself? I suppose, too, that part of the problem may be that only being there one day a week, it inevitably ends up being kind of hit or miss as to whether or not there’s much of a role for me to play in whatever is going on in class that day. Plus, I haven’t really had much of a chance to talk to the teacher (or the student teacher) about what they want from me, in general. I show up, class starts, I try to find ways to be useful during class, class ends, I leave. When is there time to work out any kind of working relationship with the teachers?
Then I ask myself: Do I need to be concerned about this? I mean, I’d feel better about the whole thing if I felt like I was being useful, for sure. But on the other hand, if they don’t need much from me, then they don’t need much from me, I suppose. It’s not as though me showing up but not doing much is “unfair” or causes problems for anyone, after all; I’m just a volunteer, and if I weren’t there, there isn’t anyone else who would be there instead. I’m putting in the hours that I’ll need to have put in if/when I decide to apply to the U, and hopefully gaining a little actual experience along the way—so my goals are getting accomplished, right? Of course, the less I actually do while I’m there, the less beneficial the experience is to me, and the more it becomes just a hoop that I have to jump through. But again, it’s not like I’m losing anything (other than an hour a week of my time, I guess) by doing it, per se. It’d be nice, of course, if I could have a volunteer experience that I would get more out of, but…hmm.
Of course, just being there is interesting, and it’s not like I get nothing out of it. On that subject, though, I have to say that I am more than a little dismayed by what I’m seeing in this classroom. I mean, I expected that a Minneapolis high school classroom might be pretty different from a Brainerd one—and I know, too, that my high school history classes were all honors and A.P.—but even so, I really have to wonder how typical this class is. It does not seem or feel like high school to me. I remember a lot of disengaged apathy among the students in my (non-honors or A.P.) high school classes…but there’s just no comparison to what I’m seeing here. They seem about 12 years old to me—unable to sit still, constantly asking to be allowed to go to the bathroom or do this or that other thing, no attention span at all. And beyond merely not being interested in learning about history, it’s like the whole reality of having to go to school, pass tests, get good grades, and all that is just not a part of their mental world. And they’re definitely not being asked to actually think, or even really to learn basic facts, on a level that seems appropriate for high school at all to me.
I know that much of this has to do with socioeconomic issues. To be sure, almost all the students in the class are African-American. I don’t know if they’re mainly from northeast Minneapolis (which is where the school is) or elsewhere; I wouldn’t have thought that northeast had the level of poverty and etc. that, for example, I’d have expected in north Minneapolis, but…I dunno. The teacher did mention to me on the first day that I came that she knows some of the students in the class can’t read very well (I’m trying to remember exactly what she said; maybe that they were at a 3rd grade reading level?). She also said that she is a bit looser with how she runs this particular class than with most of her other ones, because of the reality of what the students are like—and that she thinks some of the behavior problems stem from anxiety about being asked to read. This does lead me to be really curious about what her other classes (or other classes at this school in general) are like—but on the other hand, how different can they really be? I mean, why would all the most disadvantaged kids happen to end up in one class? And besides, even the relatively cooperative and attentive students in this class do not strike me as being at a high school level in terms of their ability to wrap their heads around abstractions or work/think independently. All in all, it’s really quite disturbing.
Anyway, these are some of my thoughts, impressions, worries, etc. at this point in my experience with volunteering. I haven’t totally figured out what to make of it all as of yet, and like I said at the outset, I’m not quite sure how to feel about the whole thing at present. I guess we’ll see how things go as time goes on.
Posted inDave's Blog Teacher Education