My First Class

     The school that I was assigned to is located in a typical urban area.  It didn't seem to be an extremely poor area, but I'm not good at judging those kind of things.  The area around the school looked very similar to many elementary schools in my hometown.  It is located on a skinny road off of a very busy road which makes for a lot of traffic when everybody is trying to drop their kids off at once.  The school is very nice inside and out and is pretty big.  I didn't realize until I talked to one of the secretaries that this elementary school was combined with a middle school.  The classrooms inside are also very large.  Looking online at the infoworks website before I went to the school, I saw that the students are very poor and many of them are not proficient in their NECAP testing (especially in math and science).  However, their attendance rate is very high and they have very few incidents behaviorwise.
     My first time volunteering for my service learning project was pretty interesting.  I was placed in a second grade classroom and I didn't really know what to expect.  When I walked in, the teacher was very nice and so were the students.  The only problem is that they were running around everywhere and seemed to be a little out of control.  After a few minutes of that, the teacher was able to get the students to sit on the carpet where they read the class rules and said the pledge of allegiance.  She showed me around the classroom and explained what they do throughout the day.  Then she told me a bit about the students and what I would be doing with them this semester.  However, I wasn't able to start working with the students right away because they had an assembly almost immediately after I arrived.
     While the class went to the assembly, I corrected papers (mostly math) for about an hour and a half.  Many students struggled on their math homework, while others did exceptionally well.  The problem is that its tough to tell who actually did what, since the teacher told me that parents tend to do the student's homework sometimes.  That seemed odd to me but I wish my parents did my homework back in the day.  When the students got back from the assembly, the teacher gave me a group of six to work with.  She asked me to do an exercise that would help improve their reading skills.  It was my first time actually teaching students.  It felt good to see most of the kids begin to understand what I was talking about as we continued to work on it.  One of the students struggled much more than the others, but only on a couple specific concepts.  I tried to give her different examples of the same concept.  It was obvious that she needed more work, but time was up and my first day was over.
     Overall, I really enjoyed my first day volunteering.  It was the first time that I was in the teacher's position and it felt good to help out these second graders.  The teacher could have a little more control over her class, but she was a very nice lady and the students seemed to like her.  It was a very interesting experience for me and I look forward to next time.