Today I had my first service learning experience out at the Easley community center. I was a tad surprised first by the age of the facility. It was older and seemed to be from the late sixties. When I arrived their were close to 50-60 kids already at the center around 3pm. The homework room was were I spent about the first hour of my time, before moving into the general activities area. Assisting in the homework room was actually a lot of fun. Of course their was a mixture of children; some intently working on their homework while others were much less focused. I had the opportunity to help one boy, we’ll call him Frank, on his algebra homework. First off all of the homework booklets were TCAP approved or written. I thought it was interesting because all of the material seemed to be directed towards helping the students excel on the TCAP assessment. Frank was struggling at first with the assignment. Clearly he had been given little instruction while in school and asked me to basically solve the problems for him. However, once I should him how to do the problem and broke it down step-by-step he started to improve significantly. It showed me that Frank was by no means academically challenged, he just wasn’t shown how to do the problems in the first place. I feel that is the case with many of the children at the center. School classrooms are probably over loaded and unable to provide children some of the individual attention that they need in order to fully grasp the concepts.
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