Community Service

Hey there students and faculty, or whoever decides to read this post! I have never written a blog before, but I just wanted to say how thankful I am for the opportunity to tutor at a citizenship class last semester! My roomate Alex and I were tutors on tuesday nights at the PBS station at the entrance of JMU. The class was made up of about eight adults seeking citizenship, most from Mexico with spanish being their first language. There was one other tutor aside from Alex and I, and there was a teacher and an assitant whose names I don't remember now. We didn't really need that many people to teach 8 students about the U.S. government, but the close teacher/student ratio allowed us to split up and work with the students one on one. However, before we split into small groups, I was wondering why they needed me because we just sat at a table while the teacher talked. The teacher was very long-winded and wasn't good at using class time wisely. The assistant didn't do anything useful, she was really loud and obnoxious and always interrupted with pointless jabber. She liked to pronounce words really loudly over and over again to the Mexican-American students who had trouble with words such as "legislative" and "representatives". Although neither of us were cocky, Alex and I felt like we could have done a better job if we had taught the class ourselves. So the progress really seemed to happen when we worked one-on-one with the students with the book, testing them on terms and helping them spell and pronounce words. All of the students were at different levels of skill in writing english, but they all improved over the few classes. It felt good to help the students and now I have more confidence in my ability to teach. I hope I can have another meaningful experience with the language and communications committee this semester. Take care of yourselves!