Olmos: Service Learning
During fall 2011, I had the opportunity to take the service learning course which gave as the main assignment to complete a number of hours within the Hispanic community. With this I had the opportunity to volunteer at the high school I attended. Watsonville high school is located in the city of Watsonville CA. During the time I volunteer at Watsonville high I had the opportunity to work with Amy Shelman who’s a health teacher. Even though she teaches the class in English I had the opportunity to help the students who are new comers from México as well as other Hispanic countries I had the opportunity to help this students with translating lectures, terms, and helping out with their assignments. I had a good experience helping out these students because I could see myself in them. Also I was able to learn about the problems these students have when they just land in this country. These students do not have the language knowledge to be able to take a course in English and be able to succeed in it, most of these kids are places in classes which are completely taught in English and they just do not have the level of preparedness to take on such challenge. This then causes them to have low grades and to feel bad about their low achievement in school. This causes stress on the kids, the idea of dropping school sometimes even crosses their mind because they just do not get what is going on in the classrooms. Most of these students don’t even take advantage of afterschool tutoring because the tutors do not speak Spanish so this causes another problem.
It’s important to take conscience of the issues been confronted by these students, its also necessary for school officials to take some action to resolve these issues. If these students were provided with more services to help them with their classes they would aspire to achieve grater things. These kids are smart they just need a little push to strive for more and get a higher education after completing high school. One of my wishes is to go back after I am done with my studies and be able to help these students to achieve greater things and be an inspiration to them. My participation in this service learning course really help me open my eyes to the issues that affect my community.
Here I have included the link of the PowerPoint I used to exposed the work I had made during my service learning, as well as the daily logs we kept of the things we did each time we visited our volunteering site.
Service Learning-PowerPoint
Service Learning-Daily Logs
It’s important to take conscience of the issues been confronted by these students, its also necessary for school officials to take some action to resolve these issues. If these students were provided with more services to help them with their classes they would aspire to achieve grater things. These kids are smart they just need a little push to strive for more and get a higher education after completing high school. One of my wishes is to go back after I am done with my studies and be able to help these students to achieve greater things and be an inspiration to them. My participation in this service learning course really help me open my eyes to the issues that affect my community.
Here I have included the link of the PowerPoint I used to exposed the work I had made during my service learning, as well as the daily logs we kept of the things we did each time we visited our volunteering site.
Service Learning-PowerPoint
Service Learning-Daily Logs