Graduation Speech : A High School Student Essay

I spend most of my week as a high school student volunteering in the elementary classrooms. I most often work with the kindergarten and first graders on a regular basis. This involves tutoring and helping them with their behavior. The progress and improvement I have been able to ignite within these students is by far my biggest achievement. When I entered the classroom, the teacher was under large amounts of stress, attempting to deal with 8 students at a time. The teacher has students who needed individual help, some who had behavior problems and others who needed different attention as they were advanced in their curriculum. During my first few weeks, my main task was to help a first grade student named Ashton. He had problems focusing, participating with the class, and keeping up with the curriculum. Likewise, he often had behavioral problems and didn’t cooperate with authority. I had a meeting with the teacher, and we made a plan as to how I could best help Ashton. We spent the first week gaging how much assistance he would need and how he reacted to me as an authority. From here, we decided that as Ashton is not able to read the directions, he needed to be walked through most of his work, so that he would be able to understand it. We than laid out a set or punishments if he was not cooperating with authority. This included laps during recess, completing his work in the hallway, flipping his behavior card, and ultimately sitting in the principal’s office. The next…