Jason Boehm-Getting Tools To City Schools- 2/24/10
This past Wednesday Miral, Chase, Ivo, Bryce, Ben, and I met Dennis in the lobby at around 2:20 to travel to P.S 335 in the south Bronx. I had brought my Flip camera to videotape our interviews with some teachers and students. We left school only to walk to West 4th street to catch the A train. We got of at 42nd street and then transferred to the number 2 train (which was a extremely long walk). There was a brief part of the train ride were it went outside. It was a very good view of the neighborhood. When we got out at Intervale Avenue, we walked down the many flights of stairs onto a main the Avenue. The school was a couple of blocks away so we got some footage of us walking at what the community was like. It looked like any other neighborhood and so did the people. I had already had some ideas of what the school would look like. I thought it would be a little less up to date and maybe less materials and more bland. These thoughts all were corrected when we walked in though. The school looked like my old elementary school and I heard a after school class were the children were laughing and looked happy. As we met the assistant principal in the lobby we introduced ourselves and then preceded up the stairs to get to the art room were we would talk to Ms. Henry the art teacher. We interviewed her with the questions we came up with the week before. She couldn’t answer all of them but when she answered the ones she could she gave us a lot of good information. She had an art class to teach so she let us interview one of the kids in her class that received the school supplies form the previous year. She was very shy yet very informative. We then went to interview the parent coordinator. Walking through the halls I noticed that the children were staring at us, I don’t know if it was because we looked different or we were bigger kids. They school was very vibrant, for example the walls were painted green and it felt welcoming. They teachers put up some of the work that the children had done in class and it was very good for 4th and 5th graders. I even saw some signs saying please donate and help Haiti, which I thought was very cool. I think this was the most important interview because the parent coordinator really gets to talk to the families and understand what they are going through. We learned a lot from her, such as most of the children that attend this school are Latin and more Spanish speaking countries. Some parents are here illegally so they feel they can’t come inside the school and be in touch with the teachers and what the children are learning. Some kids live in shelters, some live with their grandparents, uncles, and aunts. She was very informative. We then moved on to interview the assistant principal. We asked some of the same questions to her and I feel got some of the same types of answers but again she was informative and we got everything we wanted to know. We said goodbye and thanked everyone. On the train home we wrote thank you letters to our three interviewees. The trip was very helpful and I enjoyed it. I think it will give us a lot of information for our teach-in and our papers.