Field Experience

For my Education and Development Psychology class I am required to volunteer in a multicultural educational setting. I have to put in 15 hours and they assign me to a school. I signed up for an after school program, so I am volunteering at King Middle School near downtown Kankakee. I had my first experience Thursday, which is the same day that I will be experiencing this every week for the rest of this semester. I walked in the cafeteria with another girl from my class and was overwhelmed by the students. 4th through 6th grade. Probably 50-60 students. I was excited but quite nervous. Luckily I found out soon after that this was just the snack break and soon we'd be splitting up into our smaller classrooms and working on various subjects. I was assigned to Mr. Love and was handed an attendance sheet and was told where my class was generally sitting. Not a girl in sight. Ooooh boy. :) We eventually went to our classroom where I sat as not only the only girl, but also the only caucasian. There were 2 hispanic boys, and 8 black males, including the teacher. And me. Ha. This is a little different from North Daviess. I was very excited. Though I just observed that first day, when I talked to Mr. Love, he said he'd just let me take over next week. Ha. But I realized that I'm really excited to do that too. I don't want to just observe. I was quite bored. I was doing the synonym and antonym problems in my head along with them while reading as many posters and papers around me as I could. I tend to read everything in sight when I'm bored. I also worked on the names of the boys and tried to figure out their personalities and figure out how to work with each one of them. Raul is smart. He is the kid who succeeds as long as he's focused. He does well when he doesn't give into peer pressure. He's best friends with this kid (what's his name) who gives into peer pressure a lot more than Raul. The peer pressure's name is Daniel. The kid who hit his growth spurt earlier than everyone else and who is always cracking jokes and who rarely really applies himself. Christopher is the kid who is just a good kid. He works hard, does what the teacher says, but still struggles some. These are good kids. And Mr. Love is a good teacher. More than once he told a kid who was obediently raising his hand "Put your hand down, I don't want to talk to you." Teehee. :) He was also the teacher who made his class to stand up straight and threatened many times to force the kids to write a word 100 times if they wouldn't be quiet and leave the other kids alone. And he's also the teacher who pulled Daniel out of the classroom because he was just being obnoxious. He's a good teacher. You can tell the kids respect him. Yeah, this is gonna be good times.

My second field experience for personal satisfaction occurred at Zoar Community Church this morning. ZCC is pastored by William and Joan Dean, the history department chair (I believe) and the graduate program's chaplain, respectively. This church contains approximately 25-30 people, maybe 5 of which (including we 3 that attended that morning) were under the age of 50. We sang hymns so old that even I barely knew them and sang to accompaniment of an organ. After the service we stayed after and talked with many of the members of the church and learned about this history of the church, how much they loved Dr. Dean and his wife, and mostly, how we need to come back again. It was wonderful.

My third field experience will (finally) be coming in the form of homegroups. Yes!! Starting tonight at 6pm, we will be traveling to the home of Corey Zink and family (whether that's a guy or girl, we will soon find out). We have our group picked out and I am so excited to get started. I assume since they said "family" that they will have kids. So the kids are probably young, they are probably young, and yet another age group will be made contact with. I don't have much of an idea what to expect, but I'm elated at the idea of finally getting started.

Who said college has to be spent with people your age? Who said you have to stay in the bubble when attending Olivet? Who said you have to limit your contact to only people who live at Olivet? Who said you have to limit your field experience to college-related and college-fruitful learning? Who said?