Blog Post #4

For the past few weeks, I have participated in the Tunbridge Charter School Service Learning program. I was quite nervous my first time going, I was assigned to work in Mrs. Gladden's class working with fourth graders. I kind of felt like it was my first day of school, would the kids like me? Would it be very awkward and the teacher did not have anything for me to do? Of course, my fears were immediately gone after spending the first ten minutes hearing everyone's name and realizing that there was no need for me to be nervous.
Countee Cullen's poem Tableau touches on the idea of equality. Two boys were walking arm in arm and people had a problem with it because one of the boys was black and the other was white. Sadly this is still a problem in the world we live in but something very magical about children is how open their eyes are to the world around them and how they do not see the color of skin as something more than it is. I was interested to see the makeup of the class as I had been told that the majority of the students were African American. There were maybe four kids who were not African American in the entire class of around twenty kids but I think I was the only one who noticed. It was something that was so irrelevant to them they probably couldn't begin to understand why people even care about the color of your skin.
The first half of the novel "Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley, touches on the themes are being left alone and that theme although not as important as others in the first half of the novel made me think about the children at the Tunbridge Charter School. A Charter school is similar to a public school but it is more exclusive you are picked out of a lottery randomly but the school is significantly better than other public schools. All the children are lucky to be there and not to say that if they were not there their lives would be significantly worse but they are lucky to have the support of the Tunbridge School System.
Dunbar's Theology made me laugh at the last line "If there were not, where would my neighbors go? This very short poem was difficult for me to really grasp the meaning of beside the themes of heaven and hell. The simple themes of heaven vs hell is similar to a classroom environment of good and bad. The kids are in fourth grade so, in reality, they are not that young but they still need people to tell them right from wrong. I begin my service at eight in the morning on Mondays, this is a tough time for everyone even ten-year-olds who have a crazy amount of energy. Settling down, not talking to their neighbors is a difficult task for them sometime.