Day Two.
It’s storming. The alley behind my house is flooding along the backyard fence and I have to climb along an iron gate to bypass the small pond. I hurry the rest of the way to Old Soul with a ducked head and cold grimace. There, I get a mocha and tease Jessica about backing out of yesterday’s river trip and say hi to John and Lance and Nick and return home to start warming up the Acura, listening to NPR talk about tsunamis while I wait. Once the RPM’s have relaxed, I back out of my spot and join the other commuters in the storm, windshield-wipers set to medium and the heater flowing at the first notch on the dial.
NPR starts a story about Antarctic explorers.
Today I’ve decided to wear my tan-brown button-up shirt with a white undershirt and a gray sweatshirt (which is missing its zipper) with jeans and my black sneakers with their holes revealing the white socks inside.
I’m there by 2:30, a half-hour early, and thankfully get forced into a round-about detour when half the intersection is flooded at Y and 34th. There’s a cop with its headlights on parked on an perpendicular road, just sitting there, waiting for shit to happen, which I suppose is more common during hard rains like this. Shit feels like Armageddon. I steer around puddles and crawl slowly through a neighborhood and make my way around the entire campus, still arriving 25 minutes ahead of time.
Sitting in the parking lot with the engine off and the windows fogging up, I listen to NPR switch back to the tsunami topic, which is big these days. This story isn’t about 2011’s tsunami, but about another one in the late 1800’s, and the first-account depictions read from a journal are equally spooky. I watch birds fly in circles above the school and wait until 2:50 before getting out.
It’s still raining. Hard. It might rain like this all day. I hurry across the parking lot and notice the large pool forming around the fountain in the courtyard. I scare a flock of birds from the grass and they take flight into the downpour. I hustle under the awning over the cafeteria entrance and hurry inside.
This dauntingly large and empty room could fit a hundred parked cars, and maybe twice as many kids. It’s all closed up—lunch ended two hours ago—and the tables are put away and along the far wall are the offices, where obscure administrative employees do tasks by lamplight. I look to my right and see Tyler sitting at a table with his back to the wall and focus on an iPod in his hands, wires dangling from earphones down his checkered jacket. He waves. I say, “Hey,” and my voice echoes around the scattered cement pillars. The roar of the rain on the opaque sunroofs draws my attention up to the high ceilings. This storm isn’t messing around. Tyler and I lull about for about ten minutes and I scope out the student-created decorations around the hollow cafeteria. It seems to be multi-cultural month.
Soon Tyler and I hurry across the rain-soaked plaza between the cafeteria and the classrooms across from the gym. Students start pouring through the doors as classes transition on the hour. Some teacher holds the gym doors open with orange cones. Ant-colony chaos leads these kids from one place to another and I weave among them—some of them small, some taller than me, all races, all ages—and make my way to P6. Tyler says, “I’m in P8 today,” and heads off to another class. “See you in an hour.” On my own, I step into the classroom and Mrs. Coates is there reminding her students about the homework. They keep tutoring days opposite for boys and girls, and it’s just girls on Thursday.
I'm asked to introduce myself. “I graduated from Sonoma State with an English degree,” I say, center-of-attention and red-faced (still gotta get used to an audience). “Now I'm planning to join the Peace Corps and teach English overseas and I think this will be good experience for me." I realize that I'm over-gesticulating and finish quickly with, "So I look forward to helping out here.”
I feel like a fool. I have to get over that, too.
“Do you guys know about the Peace Corps?” Mrs. Coates asks. None of these kids know about the Peace Corps. “Chris—maybe you could say a little bit about the Peace Corps and what they do.”
“Um. Yeah.” I wish I could just burst out with some charismatic, Well kids, let me tell you all about the Peace Corps monologue—the kind where dramatic music starts up halfway through and there’s a lot of soft-focus angles on kid’s faces as their eyes light up. “It’s a program that sends people to other countries to help out,” is basically what I tell them. Mrs. Coates adlibs a little more about it to save the kids from going home with just my lame explanation. At the very least I think she likes me because of my commendable goal for this volunteer gig, but she knows I have no idea what I’m doing. The good news is that she’s really nice about this. I think I’ll get the hang of it soon, anyway.
So for the first hour I’m spending pretty much the whole time with one girl while she reads a page-long story about Tiger Woods and has to answer a couple questions about the text. To start, we go through each question and classify it as either a “Book” or “Brain” problem. The girl carefully and slowly reads the whole story out-loud to me, well enough—mispronouncing a few words, fumbling up a few sentences—and I can almost hear her brain sounding-out each word before she speaks. I’m reminded of my twelve-year-old sister. I feel older now. The girl and I talk through each question and sometimes she gets it right and sometimes she doesn’t and one time she admits she’d just been guessing and we talk about why she was right. Once she’s done, I get up and pace around the room and see if anyone else needs help and wait to see if Mrs. Coates will pair me up with someone else specifically, but she doesn’t. I realize how important it is for me to take the initiative here. Be my own boss. Be a teacher. Know what the hell I’m doing. So I ask other kids if they’re doing alright. They say yes. And so I end up forcing my way into a group of off-task girls and reading them flash-cards and asking for the definition of their most recent vocabulary terms. Stereotype. Complex sentence. Simple sentence. Assess. Independent clause. Half this stuff I don’t even know. They’re keeping score of who answers correctly first and the points mean nothing but they’re having fun with competition and hopefully learning—two of them more talkative than the other two, but they speak up when I ask for them to try. This goes until the end of the hour and Mrs. Coates gives her final word before they head off for transition.
The 4:00 to 5:00 block takes place in another room with rows of tables instead of desks. Here the four tutors unite to help six struggling kids with the lowest GPAs (there were meant to be 8, if not more, but I get the feeling the Principal and the Tutors have some kind of rocky relationship, so it’s been cut down a lot). The fewer the better, I guess, for those six, but still…
Anyway, I’m paired up with Randall.
Randall is an 8th grader with self-described ADD and OCD and dyslexia and a hyperactive mind and scribbled handwriting and a wild imagination and surprising political awareness and a passion for 1930’s music and quotes from Stephen Hawking floating around in his busy mind. I checked over his math homework—need to re-teach myself the quadratic equation, it seems—while he re-wrote his science homework, and he writes like his thinks. He was very curious and mature as we talked about the Peace Corps, orbital defense systems, college, nuclear weapon assessment in Iraq, and plans for the future. He sharpened his pencil with delicate concentration. He changed topics and assignments as quickly as one changes channels to avoid commercials. Then the hour was up and Randall packed up his bag and left with the group, hopefully content with the help I'd offered.
You never expect to see the quadratic equation ever again after college.
Worst Moment #1: I was putting on my sweatshirt near the door as kids came in and out of the rain, and one of those kids came up behind me to my left as I brought back my arm to slide it into the sleeve, and I elbowed him in the face. He was shocked. I was shocked. He passed some sheet of paper to the teacher holding open the door, then just slowly wandered back into the class. I apologized and slipped outside, melting into the current of students that pushed me down to P4, the detention classroom. I kept waiting for that kid to come into the class, assuming he had detention or needed somewhere to wait for his parents, but he didn’t.
Sorry kid.
Sorry kid.
Here I realized that I didn’t need to stay for the 5:00 to 6:00 hour. I’m not being paid for this and the other tutors don’t do anything but sit around and wait for any of these kids to need help with their homework, which they’re encouraged to do while detained. No one ever needs help in detention. They’re all in their own heads, anyway, or reading. I sit around for a half hour and practice the quadratic equation with Starlight and watch Tyler doodle while Kayla checks her phone and I quietly observe the students and try to remember what it was like to be that young.
Hard to remember.
When I leave the rain has stopped. There’s a road-crew out on Y and 34th and they’ve drained the flooded intersection and I see them standing on the corner, discussing something important, and I make the left turn that starts me toward home.
It was definitely a more focused day compared to the first. Sitting down one-on-one with the kids makes a big difference. There's so much responsibility on my shoulders to be an honest, truthful, inspirational figure in their lives--and right away, too, because first impressions are huge when it comes to kids. They trust their instincts. I sensed Randall poking me to see what sort of wisdom I would leak, or if I had any weaknesses, and I think I did a good job of being an elder and being a friend. Still a little squeaky on the ol' quad-formula, I'm worried I didn't do a very good job checking his math homework... And I wonder the effect on a child's brain if I were to interrupt them every time they make a mistake or if I should let some slide and plan to correct them if the same mistake comes up again later. Here I sense my fear of confrontation is getting in the way. I shouldn't worry about them challenging my assistance. So far I've sensed nothing but embrace of assistance. Doesn't help that I have this elder's bias of knowing what kind of information really matters in twenty years and what you'll come to forget and live without. It's all important to them. It's important to their grades, the test results, school funding, California's budget, the nation's deficit and global society.
That's a lot of pressure, but I think I'm starting to like it.
- Left to Fry
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