Sandy Krueger
McKinley Reflection
I’ve known for a while now that children account for most of the joy in my life. How could they not? There is nothing more amazing than watching them just be. There is no shame in their questions, no judgment in their eyes, no hatred in their hearts. In the educational world there are conflicting ideas of what we are born with. Are we, as Jean-Jacque Rousseau suggests, flowering seeds? Should adults steer clear of the developing child and let them interact with their environment? Or did John Locke get it right in his theory that we are born as blank slates, waiting to be molded and shaped by the whos and whats that surround us. Probably we are closer to what Piaget has named the “interactive generator transformer”, in that children interact differently with the environment at different ages. As we age our brains age with us, we come not only to learn more facts but we are able to think about what we learn differently. We move from sensory, goal-directed behavior to being able to think in the abstract and hypothetically. We advance from “Where’s mommy?” to “’Human rights’ is a term frequently used but seldom defined. What rights should belong to every human being?” The unanswered question of the 21st century. Maybe we aren’t as intellectually developed as we like to think.
Over the last few months I have had the opportunity to work one-on-one with a boy named Tiodene. Tiodene is thirteen years old. He is a small boy who doesn’t carry much weight. He wears glasses. He has a younger brother. He likes math, but not as much as gym class. His favorite color is black. He doesn’t like the cold. He likes to play rock, paper, scissors. He usually goes for paper. Tiodene is one African boy in Ms. Armstrong’s third period ELL class of about fifteen students. His peers are Mexican, Kenyan, American, Ghanaian. In ELL they work with the complications of the English language. In my hours there I’ve seen review of contractions, compound words and spelling. All of the students seem to grasp the material and do quite well with it, warranting at least one “Aww, Ms. Armstrong, we know this stuff! What are we stupid?” Except Tiodene doesn’t know. And what’s worse, he doesn’t even feel embarrassed when he hears his classmates complain that something that he doesn’t know is so easy for everyone else to grasp. He doesn’t feel embarrassed because he doesn’t hear the complaint.
Tiodene’s world is chaos. Everyday he is pushed through the hallways of McKinley Middle School, thrown into one room where he is expected to sit quietly and stare at a book filled with symbols and maybe a picture. Then it’s off to a different room where this time he is expected to copy more symbols from the whiteboard and into a notebook. Sometimes in this room the man writing the symbols on the board calls his name. Quiet-then laughter. The man looks at Tiodene like he is sad and so Tiodene asks why he looks like that. The man just shakes his head at Tiodene and resumes speaking the harsh, ugly sound everyone in his new habitat screeches at him. Next its another room. Here he gets to play on the computer and he likes that. Sometimes he is again forced to decipher those symbols and those days aren’t as fun. Sometimes he sits with a girl who is not his teacher, and they draw pictures on the whiteboard and she makes him repeat what she says. Sometimes he remembers what they drew last week and says those words to her, and she smiles and he feels happier than he has all day. After that Tiodene gets to eat. He doesn’t understand why all of the people he goes to this school with are so happy when its time to eat. Tiodene doesn’t like the food. After he eats Tiodene’s day dramatically improves, he gets to go to gym class. Gym class is always fun because he gets to run and play games. First he had to wait until everybody else was picked to play before he got picked. Now he is always chosen first because he is so fast. After they are done playing its time for the room where Tiodene understands. Math class makes sense to Tiodene and he is a top student. He always knows the answer, but doesn’t raise his hand because it takes him too long to remember how to say it. The teacher knows he knows though because she is always smiling at him and nobody else does that to him as much as she does. Except maybe that girl he draws pictures with sometimes…
For me, the bottom line is that the service learning is what you made it. I’m going to make an educated guess here and say that for a lot of my peers it was an inconvenience. Maybe that comes from the required aspect of it? I can see where they’re coming from, how can it be considered volunteering if we are offered something in return (a diploma)? Of course, there isn’t any way around it and certainly it is better to require it than to not have it at all. I’m assuming that for some kids they’re attitudes changed through the process and while they may have grumbled in the beginning they reflect back and are happy with twenty hours well spent. I loved it, but I knew I would. I hope in Tiodene I have made a mentee that will continue to turn to me for a smile when he needs one.
