Summer School is Fun!

One girl actually excitedly exclaimed that summer school was loads of fun - which is great! - but weird...

I'm beginning to realize what an interesting group of kids I'm working with. I just ended that sentence with a preposition. As Dave told us in his last email, "I just ended that sentence with a preposition. Deal with it." But anyway, most, if not all, of the kids have some kind of learning disability or need for special ed. Furthermore, most of them cannot do simple math problems, even at the 7th and 8th grade level. I know there must be kids all over the place with these issues and who are so far behind, but I don't think there's any reason why so many kids are this far behind. The math they're struggling with in middle school is what I learned in elementary school - adding and subtracting whole numbers and decimals, and multiplying, adding, and subtracting fractions. These are the basic building blocks of math that these kids cannot grasp. If they can't get a handle on all of this, they'll go onto high school with this sever disability in their math reasoning. And it's not like this school is in a ghetto; it's in the middle of a prospering little town, and the school has the ways and means (and funds) to teach these kids well; it just doesn't happen.

Luckily for them (or unluckily), Elma High School is in such poor shape (as far as education goes) that few students are challenged. Okay, so maybe that's a generality, but now I understand why the Elma School District is so far behind. What I want to know is how this happened in the first place. Maybe it's the teachers' faults. The teacher I'm working with is actually decent. She's not bad at all, really- from what I can tell, anyway. In one of the classrooms (not belonging to any of the teachers of summer school) there was a piece of paper with the rules of how to use the classroom library and she wrote "you're" instead of the correct "your." I think it's these little things here and there that the kids just don't learn that puts them at such a disadvantage.

Now it just sounds like I'm complaining. I'm still incredibly grateful that I'm in the position I'm in, and I know I'll have a small opportunity to help these kids, because the teacher and I can work with them one-on-one. The bad part is that I'm stuck in a math classroom; I want to observe in the other classrooms, but I'll look into doing so in a few weeks.

--Elie

P.S. I ordered a custom-made clarinet mouth piece AND a fancy ligature. The good news is that this mouth piece/ligature combo will make me sound loads better, and I basically made what I just spent by being in various musical groups, so I don't feel too guilty for spending well over $200 on clarinet accessories. Now I need to order new reeds and a reed case and maybe a new clarinet case if my mouthpiece won't fit. Argh. Good thing I've got a steady job of volunteering.