Volunteer for the Future

I went into Education in college because I love learning. I think everyone should pursue life long learning. I also think every adult should spend their life teaching others, especially children. I think this because the returns are exponential. One child learning to take care of himself = one less person taking from the rest of society and one more person building society.

For the past many years of my life, I have volunteered in the schools. Sometimes it is making copies. I'm not wild about that type of volunteering. I'd rather be teaching something. Even if that something involves listening to a beginning reader for a half an interminable hour. Over the past school year, I was asked to lead a math intervention for twelve fifth graders.

We have had good days, mostly and a few questionably productive days.

Yesterday I taught a lesson about area essentially. The point of the lesson was that if you have two numbers say 28 and 7 that you need to multiply together, you can do it in your head by breaking the 28 up into 20+8, multiplying each of those numbers by 7, then adding the resulting numbers back together to get 196.

Additionally the worksheet wanted the students to draw a representation of the break down on a section of graph paper. They all got the concept quickly. The first kid done went back into class. About three minutes later he came back into the hall where I was teaching and said, "Next time can you teach us how to do area?"

As I mentioned, I was already teaching area, but we hadn't covered it exactly the way they were in class that day. In class the object was not a rectangle like we worked with, but instead an L shape that needed to be divided up, area figured and then the results added together. It wasn't really much different, than the worksheet though. So I spent a few minutes showing this young man what was going on.

You could see the light bulb heating up (slow to shine fluorescent bulbs being the in thing and all) until finally he had it. The concept was in place, and he was functioning on grade level for that moment. It was a pretty awesome thing.

I've spent 57 hours with them this year. (I have to sign in and the computer keeps track.)  It hasn't always been convenient, but all in all, I think it has been worth it.