MLK Day

Yesterday was Martin Luther King Jr.'s Day of Service at Northeastern. Working with the Massachusetts Promise Fellowship, approximately 400 young people came out on our day off to do some service in the Boston area.

I didn't know what to expect and hadn't been told much about what I would be doing in the day. Luckily for me, I was told I would be a point person for a group going to Volunteers of America. So I set out 30some strong to the Arlington St. Church by the Commons where we walked into chaos. Our project was to help put together 500+ meals for the homeless and then distribute to major shelters and personal delivery across Boston on such a cold and precipitory day.

Despite too many hands and not enough direction or resources, I thought it went incredibly well. Our group managed to put together a good portion of meals with different types of sandwiches, an apple, water, and chips. We finished a little early and then went out in smaller groups to distribute the meals.

My group walked to City Hall and then over to MGH, but we only passed out a few meals along the way. As we got ready to leave, I took the remaining lunches and stood outside Park station where I met a nice man who stood with me and helped distribute lunches. He told me it wasn't too busy because of the weather, but I only stood outside with a "Free Meal" sign for 20 minutes max. I saw a man across the street and walked over and gave him a meal or three. It's selfish, but the feeling of giving a stranger something he really appreciated was great.

I had only stood outside for 20 minutes and still had pink hands when I got home, I felt both deeply saddened and encouraged by what had happened throughout the day. I'm glad I got an opportunity to volunteer my time on MLK Day and I'll look towards my future volunteering in a new way.

New Year

It's been a while since I last updated and I apologize for the hiatus. Happy New Year! Here's to hoping that 2010 will be a great year for everyone out there.

I missed out on volunteering last week and didn't get a chance to catch up with my teachers. Unfortunately, my schedule will be changing in the near future and I need to figure out some logistics. I hope this means I'll have more time to blog about different experiences.

I met with one of my groups this week and we went over a fraction and decimal packet. The students had a hard time focusing this week because the lesson was set up differently than usual. All students in the class were rotating between the teacher, and two volunteers. My kids stuck with me in the group and we managed to get through the entire packet with some time to check over answers.

I've been trying to help my small group with multiple choice questions and figuring out the best way to get to the right answer. It's tough because most of the students I'm working with don't want to check their answers, they'd rather get the work done and go on to do other things. It might just be a kid thing, but I'm trying to get them to check their answers against each other when we're all done with problems.

There was one question in particular where the kids were adamant that their answer was right. I said I agreed with the student who got the question correct and then asked him to explain to the others why. As soon as he finished explaining his reasoning the others quickly said "oh yeah, that's what I thought too." Having their peers explain is INCREDIBLY helpful for the other students to understand and it reinforces the concepts or problems they're explaining.

I've been introducing the elimination method for taking multiple choice questions. I ask them to X out any answers that don't make sense. I'm not too sure they're catching on though. We worked on a problem that asked for the number higher than the population of NH and less than Maine. So we went through and eliminated any choices/numbers that were more than both populations. However, when we went through the questions again to eliminate any choices/numbers that were less than both populations, some of the kids got confused and then frustrated. I think we'll go through this again as the year progresses.

Volunteer surveys

We're working on getting volunteer surveys out sometime this week. This year we're trying to get more feedback from all involved parties in Math Rules! (students, teachers, volunteers, site coordinators, schools, and staff) so we're trying out more surveys. We're hoping for a significant response rate so we can continually improve the program.

I want to start promoting the blog as soon as possible so we can reach our volunteers and possibly even get other volunteers to blog as well, but I think we'll have to wait until survey activity dies down a bit before we can start promoting the blog.