Task 3

To reiterate, I feel as though I am at a loss of things to talk about in this section, because I recognize that I have begun to develop how I want to see the world, I have been latent to act and be the change that will cultivate such a world. So, in light of that, I want to focus on a specific example of an experience that changed me, and made me aware of a new reality. Going to private school all my life, with the exception of college, I never got a first hand look at the public school system in Oakland, the city where I grew up.
In the last month of my senior year in high school, I got the opportunity to help teach in a public elementary school in Oakland for a month. Before I arrived, I anticipated that I would be helping out in the art room for 4-5 hours a day. However, quickly after starting it became clear that I would end up having alot more responsibility that I might have been qualified for.
Marcom Elementary School is located on Hegenberger and 73rd in Oakland, an impoverished part of Oakland, too small in actual size for the amount of gangs that frequent the area.
Sufficed to say, it was not an area that I had spent very much time in, and the school environment different from anything I had ever experienced in addition. My time at Marcom was spent both helping out in the art room, as well as taking a group of "gifted kids" (that is who did well on the standardized tests) and teaching them how do research on the internet.
The program was presented by the art teacher whom I was assisting, and was designed to help kids do filtered research within a database of information that was appropriate for their age level. Therefore, there was not unanimous agreement that the program was going to be useful for the kids. As a result of this, those in power decided to stick me in charge of this project. All of a sudden I was in control of these kids, had to teach them, engage them, discipline them, having never taught a day in my life beforehand. I felt overwhelmed with responsibility, yet delighted with the thought that I had the power to positive impact them.
To be sure, there were difficult times, when I didnt not know what to do, and there was nobody around to tell me. And on top of all this, there was an attitude among the educators at this school of apathy. Something I could not quite understand at the time, and still ponder frequently.
They had started to give up on these kids. They had grown to accustomed to seeing their students getting lost to drugs and gang violence, left to die on the street, and they grew unconfident that they could do anything to change that path. There was so much beaucracy in regards to making changes to the infrastructure of the school, that nobody thought there was anything they could do, even though they had all started teaching for the same person of wanting to try to make a difference. To the art teacher who I was helping, this program I was teaching, was very important to the school, and the budget, and the community.
One of my most distinct memories of that monthing teaching at the school had to do with one little boy, who suffered from cerebral polsy, and was confined to a wheelchair. The special education program at the school was astounding, two random people with no teaching credentials, essentially baby sitting kids. In the art room, they would bring them in and let them play around, and just make sure that everybody behaved.
But this one boy, he was incapable of participating like the other kids. He had no motor control in his arms, I never heard him speak, and the special ed teachers would just wheel him into a corner, and leave him to sit by himself for the entire hour, while everyone else yelled and screamed and played with the art supplies. It really hurt me the attention and treatment of that boy. It echoed with the sentiments of most of the teachers at the school, that of lost hope.
The program ended, and I went off to college, and not until recently have I been able to reorganize my goals towards making my life more geared towards following a purpose in educating.