journal1

Visit number one

Today was my first visit to the Sunnyvale Trailer Park. I was both nervous and excited to go in and meet my literacy coach, principle, teacher, and students. I wasn’t really sure what to expect walking in, but the surrounding neighborhood appeared to be an indicator of what was to come. The surrounding houses all had unkempt lawns, trash piled on the sides of the houses and the sidewalk, and even a rundown liquor store right next to the school. This gave me the impression that this school will be full of students from working class families, and there will probably be many behavioral issues. When I went in I was shocked at what I saw. There was a young boy sitting in the principal’s office waiting for his parents to come pick him to start his out of school suspension. I sat next to him and asked him what grade he was in. He turned to me and told me he was in third grade and didn’t want to talk about what he’d done. I left it at that and went in to meet the literacy coach. She was a very interesting person and seemed to have great knowledge on the subjects to be taught. She gave us many helpful hints for teaching the kids including chin tapping, elongated pronunciation, and also many ways of making the activities fun and appealing to the students. I then went in to meet the principle of the school, who we’ll call Mr. Jim Lahey, to ask him a few basic questions about discipline at the school. Mr. Lahey was very happy to see me (a male) coming in to work the kids. After introducing me to the assistant principle who we’ll call Randy, they sat me down and explained a lot of the students needed an older role model to look up to because even at such a young age some of the children were already showing signs of heading down the negative road in life, a great example being the young student waiting to be picked up when I walked in. I was then brought to my classroom to meet my teachers and students. My teacher who we’ll call Barb is very welcoming and extremely nice lady. She introduced herself and told me she was very happy to have me in helping her with the students, and was very appreciative of VIPS sending me to her. I was given a folder containing all the materials I would need to work the students and basically left on my own to get to work. I started by looking around the class and taking note of the diversity, which left me completely baffled. There were two white children, one or two Asian students, and the rest were evenly split between Hispanic and African American students. Coming from a graduating class that was about 90% white I was very surprised, but I was in no way intimidated by these numbers. I called up the first group of children two boys and two girls who we will call Ricky, Julian, Lucy, and Sara. We started by introducing ourselves and telling one thing we liked about school, one thing we didn’t like about school, one thing they were good at in school, and one thing they weren’t good at but wanted to work to improve it. Ricky started off by telling us he enjoyed doing math, didn’t like English, was good at floor hockey during gym class, and wanted to work on his spelling, grammar, and reading ability. Next was Julian who said he also liked math, was not fond of social studies, was good at coloring, and wanted to work on his reading skills. Next was Lucy who told us she loved social studies, did not care for math, was good at English, and wanted to work on her sight words. Finally we got to Sara, who told us she liked social studies, didn’t like math, was good at social studies and wanted to work on pronunciation. After getting to know a little more about the kids we started to work on a blends activity, but were quickly stopped by a fire drill that lasted too long for us to do anymore work, and I was also unable to meet the other members of my tutoring group. All in all a successful first day.