South Franklin Community Center Part I

            This last week I was able to volunteer at the South Franklin Community Center just a few miles south of school. I was more than a little excited and nervous, because although I knew we were tutoring elementary school children, I was not sure how they would receive my peers and me.

Finding the center was a challenge on its own; it was located behind the central building of an apartment complex, and we were almost at a loss as to where the building was when we arrived.  When we finally entered the building, we climbed a flight of stairs that could have belonged to the average home and arrived in a large room with several tables and chairs set up, with about four children, most of whom were obviously children of immigrants, each with their own tutor.

When two more boys arrived I noticed their mother only spoke Spanish, whether because she could not speak English or because she did not want to I am not sure.  I knew her children understood her, although they did not respond with much more than a nod or two, and from my high school Spanish classes I was able to piece together what she had said, which was along the lines of, “Go, have fun and read!”

Her older son, who was about eight, went to the bookshelf and picked out a book on archeology and dinosaurs, which he promptly opened and began reading. He struggled, and his voice was quiet, with a slight Spanish accent, as he read different names of dinosaurs. He began not at the fist page of the story, but on the introduction, a page that I rarely read or even glance at. I was instructed that the children were to read for at least twenty minutes, but this boy read for more than forty-five. I watched as he improved in that time, from struggling to pronounce ‘fossil’ to sounding out with relative ease ‘hadrosaur’, a word that I am almost sure I have never heard before.  Finally, when the center was about to close, he asked, still quietly, if we could move on to another activity. We spend the last five minutes testing his speed-reading and pronunciation skills, and when he left, I felt somehow changed by this small boy.

He hadn’t said much other than his grade level and to ask if we could read this or that, and when I asked him what he thought would come next in the book he only looked astonished and said, “I don’t know…” I was thoroughly amazed by him. He had struggled so hard through his reading but had persevered, where I might have stopped as soon as I knew twenty minutes were up. His level of determination was above what I see around my in my fellow college students, and I learned from him.