Last Thursday I met with a couple of folks from the Greater Pittsburgh Literacy Council and a little community center in Coraopolis, a town just a bit down the Ohio from Bellevue. This is going to be my new volunteer activitiy, and it's not exactly what I had planned!
A couple of weeks ago I did a four day workshop on becoming a tutor for English as a Second Language (ESL) students. Normally tutors are matched with one or two students based on the information in their application and the needs and preferences of the students. The coordinator for the section of the city that I signed up for saw that I listed computers as an interest, and by chance had just received a request from the Coraopolis community center for someone to help out with the computer lab they are setting up. She asked me if I would be ok with forgoing the usual one-on-one tutoring setup and instead helping them out with basic computer classes.
The idea of a whole class (all of five or ten people, depending on who's interested) is actually pretty daunting. I'm a nerd, I explained carefully, and most weeks at work I don't actually have to interact with actual people. The idea of working with a student whose english skills were on a par with my social skills was one of the things that attracted me to the idea of ESL tutoring. A class is definitely further outside of my comfort zone than a lone student, and I couldn't guarantee I wouldn't mess it all up and scare off their clients.
That's ok, they said, a six week basic computer class hasn't ever killed anyone, to their knowledge, and they did computer classes all the time, the curriculums are all set up and ready to go, I would do fine even though it wasn't exactly what was covered in ESL class, and the students are really enthusiastic and perfectly nice people.
"Fine", I decided, and my deeply supressed inner action hero growled "let's do this thing" and pumped an enormous metaphorical shotgun. So now I just need to get my schedule sorted out, pick some days, get some material from the coordinator, and then get down to the business.
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Teaching a class on computer sounds interesting. Do you have a computer available for each student like in an art class where each student has their easle? If so, you could end up spending a lot of one-on-one time teaching language and computing skills like Catherine's 'integrated curriculum'. Information is freedom and if the net has helped the world it is through letting every know what everyone else is doing besides giving access to jobs, low cost purchases and humor.
ReplyDeleteYour willingness to volunteer time to help others is a good example of secular ethics working to improve society without the need of supervision which brings me to your new office...
The community center has a computer lab set up with about eight computers. They've gotten a lot of help with hardware and tech support from a computer refurbishing company/nonprofit and from students at Robert Morris University.
ReplyDeleteWe're starting with an extremely basic intro to computers class over six weeks with the idea that we will attract a few students who can then give us some idea of what sort of focused instruction they would like to have one-on-one or in additional classes down the line.