Great Days of Service

I can't believe it's already October, and I did a really poor job of keeping up with the blog in September. New goal... do better in October.

I also can't believe that I only have one week left with my students before the end of the quarter, when I'll get a brand new pack of kids. I have learned SO MUCH over these past 8 weeks, mainly what to change about my class. But hey, that's a good thing to learn, too. What did Albert Einstein say? Something about how he didn't have 10,000 failures... he just succeeded in finding 10,000 ways to not do something...? I should've started counting a while back...

One thing I really LOVED doing with my 8th grade students this quarter was the Great Days of Service Speeches. I am so proud of them, and I was so happy with how engaged they were with the lessons. I decided about half way through the quarter that I was asking them to give speeches about things that don't really matter. Sure, I was letting them choose to speak about whatever topic they wanted, but at the end of the day, students don't really know what to choose anyway and they don't care. I realized I had to give them something to actually care about.

So I decided we should research and discuss poverty and homelessness. On the first day of this project, I asked students to tell me anything they thought about when they hear the word "homeless." Students called out things such as "bridges, beards, smelly, lazy, shopping carts full of stuff, inner city, trashcans on fire, drugs..." And the list goes on. It became very obvious that they thought of single, crazed men who are smelly and dirty and live in the city. So then I asked them, "Gwinnett County is a pretty affluent county, right? We don't have lots of poor people here, right? So why do we do canned food drives and stuff here?" I literally had a student raise his hand and reply, "Well we send all the food to other counties who really need it." It was astounding to realize their naivete.

Then students got into groups and I gave them different articles and data about poverty in Gwinnett. We learned that 9.6% of people are living below the poverty line in Gwinnett; the unemployment rate is up to 9%; and that just in the month of August, 1 in every 149 homes in Gwinnett county had been foreclosed. Students read articles from the AJC describing food pantries' desperate need of support and that every race, color, ethnicity, gender, and age were represented as patrons of food pantries in the county. The students were apalled when they heard that 5% of children in Gwinnett County lived in extreme poverty, which means that they live off of $8 per day or less. Finally, we looked at the fact that 22% of students at Jones Middle School are considered to be in poverty because they receive free or reduced lunches, and that the Gwinnett Children's Homeless Shelter is just two miles from our school, meaning that those students attend our school. We realized that on a national scale, 1 in 7 people lived in poverty, for a grand total of 43.6 million people, and that 51 million people are without health insurance. Right now in America, 1 in every 5 children are growing up poor. Their eyes were opened, to say the least. And I must admit, mine were too.

The students took all this information, learned how to write speech outlines, use notecards to give a speech, and breathe diaphragmatically. Then, they went out in partnerships to every single homeroom in our school and gave speeches to their peers, persuading them to participate in bringing in canned foods, diapers, and toiletries as a part of Jones Middle School's participation in the Gwinnett Great Days of Service. They did a wonderful job overall!!

I really have no idea what kind of impact it made on all the other students in the school. I saw lots of homerooms collecting canned foods, but I really have no idea if donations were higher than in past years. So I really have no idea what kind of difference it made with everyone else. But I had my Public Speaking students write Self Evaluations of their Speeches, so I got to see in their own words how it affected them. I had many students tell me that they were proud of themselves for overcoming their fear of speaking, and many said that they actually had a lot of fun giving the speeches. The majority of students made some comment about how their view on poverty and homelessness has been changed. One girl said it really well: "I was proud of myself because I realize that as 8th graders, we can make a difference."

In such an egocentric era of their lives, I was so happy to have the chance to help them see outside of themselves and wrestle with some major life issues. They felt empowered, even if on a very small scale. They were engaged in their learning moreso than I've seen before. So, I feel that it's extremely appropriate, and even necessary, to give credit where credit is due...

UGA Middle School Education Program, thank you for teaching me about Service Learning and Social Justice projects for teaching middle schoolers. I will definitely, 100% continue to do projects like this as much as possible.

For all of its many frustrations and irritations, I absolutely love my job!