Recently we volunteered at the Go Project. The Go Project is an organization that does group classes, at our school, on Sunday, teaching kids from K through 5th. Each class has a professional teacher and handful of volunteers. I chose 5th grade, and was placed accordingly in class 5B. Then we went to the auditorium for Huarambe, where we found our class and did a fun activity with them. Then we went to our class and helped kids do ELA worksheets by pointing out clues to help them get the right answer. We didn’t have time to do math because we did go bridges, where were did a little bit of interview prep and a team building exercise, after that we were dismissed. Some kids were very friendly but some clearly didn’t want to be there. At one point, one of the more disruptive students, made a joke about how people who come to the go project were all poor. The Kids were all really different, the two girls that I worked with tried hard to do well and wanted to get all of the questions right. Oliver worked with a boy who wasn’t motivated at all and felt no need to try hard at all. He basically said that he didn’t find it interesting at all to memorize things all day. This is something that is not entirely uncommon in public schools. People are required to repeat but not necessarily understand information, put it on a test, and after that they can just forget about it. Teaching for the test is a very common practice in public schools because they need students to perform well on tests as one of the ways to get funding. Over all, we were able to see a wide variety of students all seeking a better education.
