Blog #4 - The Benefits of Helping A Grade-Schooler

Nicholas Garaycochea
7-8-2009

When I was first assigned to take on the task to work with a fellow Summer Scholar in the assignment of helping a grade schooled child develop an interest for college and higher education, I was very curious whether my partner and I were going to make an impact in the child’s life.
When my partner, Camille and I arrived to North High School for our first meeting with the student, I was a little nervous. I can recall awkwardly reaching my hand out to the assigned student in front of one of the crowded class rooms and introducing my name to her, “H-hello, I’m Nicholas,” with the crowd responding in boisterous laughter. But once we found a quiet room, sat down and began asking questions to our student, a young eighth-grader named Bryonna; my senses seemed to simmer down. After a short while, we composed a collage of newspaper clippings and magazine cut-outs. This poster was to be called, the “Dream Careers Collage.” When the collage was completed, we discovered that Bryonna’s main interest revolved around clothes, and babies. After the meeting, Camille and I decided that I should find more information about the study of Fashion Design, and that she would find more information about occupations and studies involved with child care.
After our successful first meeting with Bryonna, Camille and I created two PowerPoint presentations that would summarize both of the studies that Bryonna had inclined herself towards to during our collage brainstorming activity. Thus, our next Service Learning Project was to further enrich our student by delving into each of these studies. When the day arrived for our next assignment of presenting those presentations, our young Bryonna could not make it, so our meeting with her was unfortunately cancelled.
Because of Bryonna’s cancellation for our second meeting, Camille and I decided for the next meeting to be a combination of the PowerPoint presentations and the next assignment: helping the student write a Career essay about a specific area of interest, be it Fashion design, or Child Care.
When the date for the third meeting finally arrived for us to present these two assignments, the meeting was again cancelled, this time without any word from the organizer of the meetings due to the Independence Day week end.
Tomorrow, Camille and I will once again attempt to meet with the student, this time combining not two, but three assignments with the final one being that Camille and I need to help our young student develop a strong and focused “Action Plan,” that will help her stay on track of her goals throughout all the confusions and disruptions of focus that too many uninformed students will have to face during their high school years. I believe that if Bryonna embraces this plan tomorrow, she will be able to turn to this plan whenever she needs to clarify what goals need to be done in order to be successful and to reorganize or change them as her interests and capacities to think in broader spectrums grow.
So far, other than the disappointing cancellations of some of the meetings, I think that volunteering to help younger kids who are interested in college made an extraordinarily positive impact on me, not by just getting out of my comfort zone to assist people I didn’t know to well, but also to guide my little brothers and sisters at home to likewise create plans of action that will help them in their future endeavors in higher education and whatever else might be out there for them.