My First Day (prompt 1)

On Tuesday, October 5 I took part in my first day in the after school tutoring program held at the Dr. Martin Luther King elementary school in Providence.  It is located in a quiet area located right down the street from Brown University. The school is quite big and has two floors, my session is held in the cafeteria so I entered through the front doors and headed to the right where the cafeteria is located at the end of the main hallway.  Once i arrieved in the building i met my supervisor "John".  As we walked to the room it felt like the school was a warm and welcoming atmosphere to the children that attend it.

I was interested at what is valued in this school and looked into it on infoworks. The school's population is made up of 48% African-American,27% Hispanic, 22% white, and 1% of both Asian and Native American. None of the students at this school recieve ESL. 83% of students are non-recipeints of special education, but 13% is general education with support and 4% is self contained. 74% of students that attend this school recieve free or reduced lunches. According to past test scores this school is improving and it seems like they strive to achieve only the best with their students, but it also seems like there are a lot of behavior issues in the school.  They do have a lot of recorded out of school suspenions and it is only an elementry.  You can see the wide dynamic of cultures and characteristics just from taken in the after school program.

Since I am tutoring in an afternoon school program I only get to experience the way the cafeteria is set up in order to hold this tutoring program.  The cafeteria is split in half, one side is for tutoring and the other half is for the program that the local YMCA holds for children who need to stay after school because their parents are not home.  On "my" side of the cafeteria there are 6 tables set up, one for each grade.  All grades K-6 are eligable to participate in this program.  I was lucky and landed the spot of tutoring 7 high strung and troublesome first graders.  I met the teacher that runs the first grade table here name is "Wanda" and the first thing she told me was "these kids are hard to handle."  As I looked at the table that the children were seated at I saw one girl hitting another girl with a pencil, three students trying to do homework and two girls eating their afternoon snack.  Immediatly I knew this would be a challenge. Once I introduced myself to the children they all got out their homework and wanted only myself to help them on it.  We completed their homework and they earned free time.  I was impressed when I was able to get 5 out of 7 to play the quiet game and actually keep them quiet for a full 15 minutes.  After our free time which consisted of the quiet game and reading some books it was time to go home.