Reflective Essay: Working With The America Learns After School

As a service learner, it is my goal to better myself, assess and improve my social awareness and responsibility (especially involving social justice), and to do something that is meaningful to me. I wish to improve lives and people’s days, even if it is something incredibly minimal like making a child smile by coloring a picture for them. I want to feel invested in my community. It is these reasons which lead me to choose working with the America Learns after school program at the Tobin K-8 School. There are opportunities and instances every day when I feel like I have made an impact in a student’s life. Two weeks ago, there was a bit of a behavioral incident with one of the students at program. Normally well-behaved Issea surprised me …show more content…
He was disruptive and distracting to other students as well by yelling and running around. I have worked with children with behavioral problems before, but most of them were diagnosed - when a child would act up, it was generally due to his/her not taking their medication. This was my initial reaction. Perhaps Issea was supposed to take something and hadn’t this morning. I then remembered our first time together at program when Issea told me he had six siblings and that his mom was about to have a baby. I began to wonder if his unusual behavior was a result of lack of attention. Maybe at home that day or week Issea felt as though his mother and/or siblings were too focused on other things (like the new baby), and he was feeling left out or unimportant. I pulled Issea outside and sat down to talk with him. After explaining that it wasn’t okay to distract his friends from their homework, I asked if mom had had her baby yet. That set him off, “That’s all anyone talks about anymore!” he yelled. After that outburst, we talked about how when new babies come into the world, a lot of people focus on it, just like a lot of people focused on him when he was born. I told Issea that babies are hard to make, and it is special if moms can have babies. Just because his family is …show more content…
Mayolin in particular only speaks Spanish other than the basic English words - hello, thank you, please, etc. I work at program Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Tuesdays, a fellow tutor who is majoring in Spanish works with Mayolin, but on Thursdays, she isn't there. Those are the days I, as the second most spanish-fluent tutor, work with Mayolin. At first, this was a challenge for me. It is one thing to try and explain homework to an English speaking first grader, and a completely different ball game to explain homework to a Spanish speaking first grader. There was one activity instructing to “draw and write about your day at school”. The drawing was great, however when we got to the writing portion I was stuck. I wondered if I should be teaching Mayolin how to write in Spanish or in English. After all, we aren’t supposed to discourage the students’ cultures, but we also need to teach them English. The homework instructions were given in both English and Spanish which confused me further. After using my resources to help me clarify this problem, there was a whole new situation at hand. In my mind I was thinking, “oh great she has math homework! That topic is universal, she will be able to do that no problem”. I then realized that I don’t know how to say “plus” in Spanish. Addition was a struggle, a lot of hand motions and holding up fingers, but we got the hang of it. Contrary