Service Learning Reflection

Service learning has been a whole new experience for me. Yes, I did plenty of volunteer work in high school, but service learning is just a whole different ball game. 

I chose to do my service learning at Bruce Guadalupe Middle School in Milwaukee, through the YES Project. The volunteers essentially are tutors for the middle school students. We tutor them in basically every subject. Some of the volunteers are part of the PT/Exercise Science program at Marquette so they create a "physical fitness" workout for the kids for part of the time we are there. This seems to be the kids' favorite part of the day.

The tutoring portion of the day seems to be a little more difficult for the student volunteers. The difficult part is connecting with the students. Some of the volunteers have been tutoring the kids since first semester. This makes it a little more difficult for the volunteers (including myself) to create a relationship with the kids. The kids at this school are mostly of Hispanic decent. They come from all different walks of life, and it seems important that they have positive role models in their life. I feel that it is more than likely that any of the volunteers at the YES Project could be positive role models for these kids. The hardest part is creating and developing a relationship with the kids.

Creating a relationship with the kids in the program has proved to be a little more difficult than I thought it would be. Some of the issues are that we only see the kids once a week for two hours at a time. This is hardly enough time to get to know someone, especially a middle school kid, who may already feel awkward around college students. Another issue is that most of the conversation topics are focused around school work. Because we are there to tutor the kids, we are asked to help them start (and hopefully finish) most of their homework. This is because some of the kids may not have the best home environment where they can stay focused and finish their school work. If and when we help them finish their homework can we have a personal conversation with the kids. 

While connecting with the kids has been more difficult than I imagined, I will not give up on creating a positive relationship with a few of the students. I feel that I just have to continue being open to the students, and hopefully they will feel comfortable with me. Last week I had a conversation with one of the girls (her name was Kenya, which I thought was the prettiest name ever) about Justin Bieber. I thought this was one small step on the way to being a positive role model for these kids. So if I have to talk about tween things for a couple hours a week, in order to create relationships the kids, I don't mind doing so. Every week gets a little better, so hopefully I will see more progress this week!