Literacy

It’s been a long time since I was in elementary school, its hard for me to remember what I knew back then and compare it to what these kids know now.  As I help the kids at Easley with their homework, especially math homework, I’m surprised by how little they know.  I was helping one first or second grader with simple multiplication homework.  Math has always come easy to me, I actually remember doing my multiplication tables in kindergarten so I’m not sure how much the average second grader should know.  I’m also not the best at teaching basic mathematics.  Mathematics and the sciences are subjects that build off a foundation.  These kids are in the process of learning that foundation.  I feel perfectly comfortable using that foundation to teach more complicated topics but I do not know how to build that foundation out of nothing.  While I’m helping the children with their math homework, they are constantly trying to use their calculators.  I can convince them to do a few problems by hand, just to make sure they know how its done, but they are easily distracted and it can take them up to 10 minutes to do a simple math problem.  In the end I usually just let them use their calculators so they can finish up and move on to other things.  In the end though, I don’t feel like this is doing them any favors.  If they can’t do simple multiplication by hand or in their head and have to constant rely on a calculator, it will be a crutch for them the rest of their lives.  Based of my own learning experiences, these children are behind in their mathematic abilities, but I realize that I was ahead of the game and it’’s unfair to compare them to me.  So I’m really not sure where exactly these kids fall on the academic scale.  I would assume they are behind based on all the reading we have done about inner city kids but I don’t actually know. 

Space

When I first started going to Easley, the equipment was falling apart.  It was a rainy day so everyone was inside, right outside the homework room.  As the second hour came around, the children still working on their homework would be distracted by the children playing right outside in the lobby.  The window that connects the rooms didn’t help this at all.  The center had a few table games like foosball and pin pong and some board games like scrabble and chess.   Everything was missing stuff.  The board games were missing pieces and the table games, especially the foosball table, were falling apart.  While I was playing with the children, I was having trouble keeping up with all their rules they had made to get around the lack of proper equipment.  While I was playing foosball I got stuck on the “bad” side, to be honest I don’t think there was a “good” side, which had no backfield (defenders and goalie).   Ping-pong was just as bad, the paddles were all beaten up and had tape on the handles.  This actually reminded me of the pool I work for during the summer.  I know that ping-pong paddles don’t last long when they are for public use.  This last visit I was there was the day after Thanksgiving break.  Like every other time I have been at Easley, it was rainy and wet outside so the children were all playing inside.  Some of the younger girls were coloring quietly with crayons in the corner.  As I investigated further, I say they were coloring in Thanksgiving turkeys.  Now I don’t know if they had chosen to color in turkeys or if that was all there was to color but its now the Christmas seasons, I would expect them to be coloring in Christmas things.  Toward the end of my volunteering, someone invested a lot of money to buy new equipment for Easley, there was a new Ping-Pong table, pool table, air hockey table, and foosball table.  This has added a few more things for the kids to enjoy, the young boys seems to be taken the most advantage of this mystery person’s generosity.