Students qualifying for free/reduced-price lunch: 73%

Students meeting proficiency standards:

in English: 36%
in Math: 41%

Demographics:

African American: 48%
Latino: 40%
Other: 12%

This is the school where I will be teaching, starting in a couple of weeks.

A few weeks ago, I heard about Citizen Schools. It’s an organization that was founded in Boston in 1995 by two guys who wanted to give kids in separate-but-unequal schools an opportunity to learn a little bit differently. Volunteer teachers go into the schools for an hour and a half, one day a week, for a whole semester, to lead their group of middle-school students through a real project that culminates at the end. It’s basically an apprenticeship. You teach them what you know about whatever field it is that you work. There are lawyers, financial people, forensics investigators, dietitians, book publishers, etc from big, fancy companies you’ve heard of a million times. And then there’s me. The lowly Minus.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll all go present the logistics of our particular apprenticeships to these kids and then they get to choose which project they want to be a part of. Throughout the semester, you work towards a particular end product that they will present to an audience at the end.

I don’t have any idea what I’m going to have my apprenticeship be about, so that’s what I’ll be trying to figure out during these next couple of days. Whatever it is, it won’t be boring.

This is the first year for Citizen Schools in New York, and there are four schools participating. Two in Harlem. Two in Brooklyn. It’s a really great program and a cool way to learn. It also helps them to see what kinds of jobs they can have by using the things that they’re already good at and interested in. Did you know that 50% of the kids in this country aren’t graduating high school? Seriously. 50%. 50% of our childs are left behind.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 11th, 2008 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Brooklyn.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.


Previous Entries