Numba 8

        Today was our 3rd time volunteering at the 826 writers room at EMK. Today we had a different class than usual. It was a guided study hall for special ed students that were working on history papers about the causes of world war 1. It was interesting to refresh my mind on that topic since I hadnt learnt about it since sophomore year of high school. For the first time I was helping a student that wanted help. He was very open to critiques and was willing and able to express his own thoughts. He wasn't looking for me to give him the answer and he took instructions really well. This is the first time I have had a student like this. Most of the time they are unmotivated or as the 826 people want us to say "uninspired at this moment," and don't want help. In past times the students have looked to me to give them answers because they were unsure of what they were supposed to be doing. In this case it was refreshing to work with a student who was eager to get work done. He had an understanding of the prompt and the material. He had a general outline of what he was going to write about but had no thesis or evidence. We walked through the documents he was provided and I told him how I normally go about analyzing them. He picked it up fast and wasn't hesitant to start analyzing them on his own. I even noticed that he interpreted certain things in ways I would never of thought of. Being able to listen to someone else's interpretations, ideas, and thought process has always been something that I have found fascinating. It is the reason why I was excited to do volunteering in the writers room. My expectations of the writers room were to be working with little kids on easy writing assignments. When I found out I was going to be mainly working with 12th graders I became much less excited. After my first two times I wasn't completely thrilled with the experience. I felt I didn't know the best ways to work with and help the students. I still learned a lot about what questions to ask and how to ask them and this knowledge really payed off when I had a student who was receptive. I felt like the teacher for this class was also doing a better job of keeping his kids on track and helping out the tutors when needed. He was able to do this because it was a much smaller class. I noticed that this special ed class was all guys and I am curious if that is a trend throughout special ed classes at the EMK and around the country. I wasn't even able to find much research on it but that may be in part due to the wifi in my building being extremely slow. I know the leveling of classes in my high school were drastically racially skewed and I would be not surprised if there was a huge gender component too. That's a topic for a whole other blog post.