Outreach Blog 1

Outreach Blog #1

My first engagement was on October eighteenth at Dexter High School in Ms. Fyke’s classroom.  She teaches mostly freshman English classes with one sophomore class thrown in the middle of the day.  My time during each unit lasted four hours from eight in the morning until noon.  I made sure each night before I went to school I had a nice pair of clothes ready for the morning.  Assisting in a classroom doesn’t necessarily mean I have to have my Sunday best on but there should be a presentation of composure and professionalism.  The location of my outreach, Dexter High School, is populated by largely middle/upper-middle class white kids so I knew having gone there that I wasn’t reaching out to the disenfranchised and needy urban youth.  But they are a very homogenous community so part of my goal in this engagement was to give them the tools to initiate with something new or on a deeper level.

My experience at Dexter was that many of the teachers that taught me never got me to engage with the material we were learning in that I was never excited to go to class or saw how what we were doing in class might relate to something I’d like to do.  When I thought about the teachers that had made an impact on me I tried to examine what it was they did to capture my interest.  I realized they made the classroom more of a dialogue than a lecture.  They informed about what we needed to know in order to carry on a conversation and that related it in a way that engaged the human element for me.  Why someone was passionate enough to put pen to paper that they felt they had to write this story.  Or what did this moment in history mean to these people even thought it may not affect me in any direct way?  My experience with Dexter is that they were cramming in what they needed to in order to raise test scores.  I wanted to try and engage the students in the same way and to the same degree that I was with teachers I enjoyed.