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.
