What did I do?

 

I supervised and tutored kids kindergarten through fifth grade at an afterschool program (L.E.A.P.S.), run by a non-profit called East Bay Community Resources at Henry Haight Elementary School, an AUSD school. Supervision of kids included watching and making sure that the kids understood and followed the program’s rules, punishing them if they fail to after multiple warnings, and making sure that they complete their homework on time. Tutoring included helping and guiding children through their weekly English/vocabulary packets, assigned reading, and a math curriculum called Eureka Math. I interned a total of 23.5 hours throughout a period of three weeks from September 19, 2017, to October 4, 2017. I tried to intern every day after school was over if it was possible.

 

Week 1 (7and ⅔ hours)

 

The first week of my internship has been rough. I had to start the internship on a Tuesday because it was required for me to undergo an orientation. I spent the majority of the week trying to get to know each and every kid’s name, but it was very hard since there was a lot of them; assigned to multiple different teachers. It didn’t help to not have a set teacher/class that I helped every day, I got to help Ms. Nicole, Mr. Sam, and Mr. George’s classes this week.

 

Week 2 (7 and ⅚ hours)

 

A lot of the kids don’t listen to me and it’s really rough. I have to get the teachers to intervene when they refuse to listen to my instructions. Going forward, I definitely want to build up my authority. Thus far, I’ve had both good and bad experiences when tutoring the children. The worst experience was on a day when I was assigned to help Mr. George. One of the fifth-grade girls wanted help on their math homework and when I went over to help, she insisted on getting spoon-fed answers. I refused and prompted to guide her through four regrouping problems, however, this proved futile. I could tell that the kid KNEW how to do the math homework… It’s just that she refuses to exercise those skills. I’m lost because I can’t figure out how to help these kids.

 

Week 3 (8 hours)

 

It seems that it’s much easier to exercise authority over little kids when you know each and every single one their names. I’ve listened into their conversations taken advantage of the fact that I can ask other kids for the names of kids that I don’t know yet to build up a mental database of all of the children’s names. This had made week three, by far, the easiest week yet. For some reason, all the classes were held outside this week. This meant that there was a lot more supervising to be had this week and less tutoring time. The kids were more incentivized to finish all of their homework so that they could go have more recess time.

 

Closing Report

        Going into this, I already had some experience dealing with elementary schoolers since I had volunteered at the children’s room at the Oakland Main Library two years ago. There I had already built up some of the skills that I used at this internship. For this internship, some skills that were very important was the ability to be patient with the children and the ability to speak and explain concepts in english and math in language that they may understand. Kids won’t always understand lessons, so it is common that they need your help in tutoring them for extended amounts of time. If you can’t explain things in language that elementary schoolers can understand, it only exacerbates the problem. One instance of this is when I failed to explain how the math concept of ‘regrouping’ worked to a third grader. I was forced to explain the math through a very convoluted and round-about way. When supervising the children during playtime/recess time, if you don’t have an aura of authority, they won’t listen to you. For the first week or two, I didn’t have that exude the aura so the children would run circles around me and continuously break rules in front of me. This required me to be dependent on the class’s teacher to timeout the rule-breaking children out during this time. Eventually, however, I learned to control the children. It was surprising to me how much power knowing a kid’s name carried when it came to managing them.

        For this internship, I expected to have more work in the form of grading papers since I had a lot of work to do when I went to Henry Haight for elementary school, but it turns out that elementary schoolers these days have a lot less work than when I was in elementary school. I learned that at Henry Haight Elementary School, they no longer graded students with letter grades such as A, B, C, D, and F’s, but rather on a number system from 1 to 4; 4 being “student was amazing this semester.” This concept made sense to me since elementary schoolers don’t really need to have letter grades assigned for classes. Letter grades only really become important during high school. However, in the seven to eight years since I had attended the very same school and the very same after-school program, everything had changed and it was really hard to adjust to since I had expected a lot of it to still be the same as nearly a decade ago.

        Daily duties included tutoring in English and math during homework time, usually around 4:30 PM; after recess and snack time. And supervising children in either the big playground or the “kinder yard” a playground specifically for kindergarteners during recess time before and after homework and snack time.

        Other than the obstacle of not having any authority over the kids for the first week, I also had some trouble dealing with kids during homework time. I’m not sure whether it was because most kids didn’t have much homework, or they finished it all during regular classes, but there weren’t a lot of kids that needed help with homework. In Mr. George’s class, I had trouble guiding a fifth grader in doing math because she kept on wanting spoon-fed answers or to be allowed to use a calculator to solve pretty basic subtraction and addition problems. It was evident to me that the student knew the skills and possessed the ability to solve the problems herself, but she was more interested in getting the work done in the fastest way possible even if it meant that she wouldn’t learn from doing the work. It got me thinking that perhaps some kids actually do have homework to do, but they say they don’t have any or say they’re done with the work because they simply don’t want to do their homework. Another teacher, Mr. Sam asked me a question directly about this problem during week two of my internship and I was stuck without an answer because it is and was a really tough problem to solve. The after-school program was not strict in its discipline, so it would be really hard to implement any solution towards this problem. Not being able to provide an answer to Mr. Sam’s question will forever remain a reminder and a regret.

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Specific skills used during this internship include, but are not limited to:

• Patience

• Ability to explain academic concepts and skills to children

• Leadership and Management of children

• Discipline

• Communication

• Imagination