graceland's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Laughing and smiling among broken glass pieces I volunteered tonight at a teen girls' foster home. It was a great activity for me and, I hope, for the girls. They're pretty much all teen girls in crisis - and I know as a teen girl it can always feel like you're in crisis but these girls are truly troubled. For one reason or another they are separated from their parents and in a revolving door of care, in between families taking them or going back to one parent or another or a guardian who may regain custody, deserving or not. They live in a dormitory, kinda like an orphanage you'd see in movies. And they don't know if they might get a call and have to be moved from that dormitory in the next 24 hours. That's a pretty eff-ed up way to live at any age. So I spent a few hours with them and we had a good time. My volunteer work offers a revolving assignment of visits like this, usually to hospitals, but something tugged at me with these girls. I spoke with the Director after the session about doing some more work with the Center on a consistent basis. I was talking with one of the girls who is a senior in high school. I asked what she's learning and she said she's trying to study for the SAT's. I asked her if she had taken the PSAT's and she said that she had, but she'd been two different schools since last year and never received her results. She has no idea how she did or what she should be working on. Beyond that, the schools that teach foster kids have double the work because even if a kid says they are X grade, you have no idea of their competency because they are being pulled in and out of different schools. The teachers can barely cover core competencies. So I go to thinking...When I was in college, I was at the top of my class for English and the Dean of Arts & Sciences asked me if I would come onboard and work with a new hire coming in to set up a writing center. I started training junior year and by senior year I had pretty much nothing to do because I had somehow finished all my required courses in 3.5 years (amazing, I know, for a stoner), so I sat in this office they gave me in the faculty office building and offered a few office hours a week when my peers could come to me for tutoring. I guess a lot of schools offer this, but it was a novel idea at my school when I was brought on board. The truth about my college is that in the Northeast, it's commonly known as "The kids who could have gone Ivy League, but never felt like working that hard." It was funny at first, because, well, I'm Graceland. I was one the biggest stoners at school and I partied like it was my job. But the school gave me this office in the faculty office building and there I sat and got paid to help my friends with their papers. I never wrote them for them. Unless they paid me. Kidding! It was a little weird at first, because my idiot friends would go running by screaming my name followed by "burrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnerrrrr" or "aaaaaaaarghhhhhhhhhhh" but ahhhh...things quieted down and people started making appointments to see me. And then it was, like jammed packed. And people started coming by to show me their higher grades and just have me proof for them. So it worked out. Anyway, I was thinking, since I've done it before and have some training, maybe I could tutor some of these girls who want some extra help. Just an hour or two a week. Because when I was looking around the the dorm tonight, I could see it. Several of the girls - they're on their way to making the same mistakes as their parents. But one or two of the girls? One or two, maybe more, with just a little extra help - they could get out of there. They could make it. They could have lives their parents couldn't even dream of. That's what I have, a life my parents hardly knew was out here. I think I can help someone else move toward that. So that's what I'm going to research this week. 11:25 p.m. - 2005-10-17 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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