Erin - TP 7

Yesterday morning, I drove a group of volunteers out to Quincy to volunteer with the PAEC summer program, which is the same program we had volunteered for on campus, except Quincy is where it is based. My experience here was fairly different, though. First of all, all four of us were split up, and I was placed in a middle school classroom. The second major difference was that, on campus, the teachers and students had been much for welcoming and instructive, and there in Quincy, I had to work hard to insert myself into the flow of the classroom and understand what was going on and who was in charge.
I finally discovered that they were each writing short autobiographies of themselves, which were being made into books to share with a second grade class. The teachers wanted me to work with the students on editing their stories; this was somewhat of a challenge because the students seemed to be very closed to my help at first. One girl even told me she didn't need or want my help, but when the teacher told her to show me her paper, I tried to make conversation and encouraged her, and she warmed up to me. After that point, I worked one-on-one with about four students during the two hours we were there; the majority of the time was spent focusing on grammatical corrections, especially subject-verb agreement, verb tense agreement, and comma placement. Although some students were born in other countries, such as Mexico, most of them had been born and raised in the States, so their English was conversational, and their writing was fairly fluid; the only real mistakes they had were those I just mentioned that might arise from translation, and they were mistakes easily practiced with each student.