Day 2

So today was my second visit to Classic City High School. From now on, I'm going to be going every Wednesday at 10:15 instead of Mondays. Today was a lot different than last week- in both good and bad ways.

When I first got to the Language Arts classroom, the teacher told me the students would be taking some notes at the beginning of class. I sat in the back as they took notes about illiteracy in America for about twenty minutes. Most of them seemed disinterested in the content of the PowerPoint- they stared at their phones and whispered to each other instead of writing things down. I noticed that the boy I mentored last week- Michael- kept complaining about everything he had to write. The teacher was telling them exactly what they needed to write down and making everything easy for the students, and he still didn't want to participate! This was frustrating for me to watch.

After the note taking, the teacher informed me that the students would be reading novels on their own for the rest of the class period. After a quick conversation with the student sitting next to me about the book he had chosen to read, I decided to wander over to the math class across the hall to see if I could help another student out.

The math class was a completely different environment. There were only five students in the class- four of them sat at individual tables and one sat on the computer. The math teacher, Ms. Cho, stood at the SmartBoard, explaining to the students how to find the mean, median, and mode of a set of data. I sat down at a table with a girl I'll call Cara. Cara didn't seem to pay attention to Ms. Cho at all. She rolled her eyes and refused to answer any questions. I really didn't think she understood the material so I tried to help her out, but she started to draw on the back of her paper instead. I watched her for a few minutes and realized that she had real drawing talent. So I struck up a conversation about her art to get her to trust me a little more. Surprisingly, it worked! I asked Cara if we could work on one of the problems together and she began to do the math like a pro. She knew the material all along!

The most important thing I learned from today was never to judge a student's abilities in the classroom. Even though it seemed like Cara wasn't paying attention and didn't know how to complete her work, she actually knew the material backwards and forwards. It made me think that she might not be challenged enough in the classroom, that could be one reason that she's so bored. I hope I get a chance to work with Cara again next week- I would like to get to know her more.