Week 2

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes, “A Dream Deferred”

Teaching Me the Tough Truth

“What are you going to do after this? You don’t want to be a teacher, do you?”
“Yes.”
“Not with Chicago Public Schools, I don’t hope.”
“Um, yeah.”
It is this middle-aged woman’s tenth year as a teacher. She just moved from D.C. where, she implies, the teaching/learning situation was (surprisingly) much better.
The dropout rate is 50 percent in Chicago schools. Let me make this clear: On a yearly basis, only half of the freshman entering a Chicago high school will graduate. This is verse the 16 percent U.S. average, which when compared with other developed nations, is abysmal.
Students of AVID (Advanced Via Individual Determination) were reading a book entitled There Are No Children Here. It’s about two brothers who grew up on Chicago’s West Side and struggled with staying in school or dropping out early on.
This led to a discussion on the CPS dropout rate, and reasons it could be so high.
“People get bored.”
“Sometimes, you know, people have to take care of their family.”
“Students need different ways of motivation,” realized one student.
“Maybe it’s the whole culture of school or schools,” added a program manager from a local non-profit.
It could be the CPS Board of Education, which is a group of appointed advisers. No one on the board is either an educator or an elected official, the teacher grimaces. This differs from almost every other school board in the country.
If a parent doesn’t like how the board is handling policy, she has no say. When poor performing schools “turnaround” and fire most of their teachers, only to reopen with no real reform plan, a parent has no say.
The board members are on and off with the command of the mayor, not the parents and community members of those they serve. There is no accountability for the CPS Board of Education. And who could handle all this decision-making anyhow? –not Board President Michael Scott, who two weeks ago shot himself dead.
Maybe Chicago is known as the City of Big Shoulders because it bypasses the citizens and does it all by unelected committees.
I shouldn’t be quick to judge, though.
“I usually ask people who have been on the job long as you have, how’s the chair?” To that, I nod to this disgruntled but painfully accurate woman: in the midst of this and trying to stabilize from Azerbaijan, I really have no idea what’s going on.

Week 1

“Giving kids clothes and food is one thing but it's much more important to teach them that other people besides themselves are important, and that the best thing they can do with their lives is to use them in the service of other people.”

-Dolores Huerta

Defining Service Learning

Service-learning Components:
1. Investigation
2. Preparation
3. Action
4. Reflection
5. Evaluation
6. Celebration

Practice Standards:
Integrates learning through academics, applied in an action
Identifies a genuine need in the community
Supports youth voice and choice
Establishes partnerships, or collaborative efforts
Creates reciprocity, or an exchange in information, ideas or skills

Student Outcomes:
Academic development,
Social development, and
Civic engagement


Hog butcher for the world,
Tool maker, stacker of wheat,
Player with railroads and the nation's freight handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of big shoulders.

-Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”

Overview: Addressing Needs

Five Hispanic ELL students, scattered across the corner a small classroom, discuss Walkout, a dramatization of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement of the late 1960s and early '70. Students review a question guide, and character by character identify who was in charge, who was secondary in the movement, and who the movement could have done without. Problem solving, listening comprehension, literacy skills, and lessons in history, civics and their own culture make up the Life Skills curriculum for this class.

This is the good stuff that’s happening in Chicago Public Schools. Neither I nor my roommate experienced a class like this in high school – one that is designed to identify, analyze and learn from the impact the leaders had on their community – and then use that information to benefit our own.

Topics in Leadership is part of the Social and Justice Academy, one of three Small Learning Communities designed to engage students in what interests them most. SLC is a grant-based school structuring program piloted last year. It was introduced to the freshman class at 12 different high schools in CPS. Other groups, or “houses,” comprise of the Fine Arts Academy, and the Science, Business and Humanities Academy.

The two schools where I’ll be working, both on the northwest side of Chicago, are participating in SLCs. This is beneficial for service learning since cross-curricular (math, science, English, foreign language, etc.) literature will concentrate on social justice, fine arts, or science, business and humanities, instead of a slew of undefined and unconnected readings. This helps students and teachers define which service-learning activities they’ll design and implement.

At one school in the Fine Arts house, students are reading Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman. Seedfolks takes place in an underdeveloped neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. The neighborhood is plagued with garbage and violence and community members who are scared to make eye contact with one another.

One day, inspired by her father who was a farmer, a young Vietnamese gal dug a few holes and planted lima beans. Neighbors from different ethnicities, nationalities and age groups grew interested, and began to plant. They planted for different reasons: because they were forced to by a social worker, because they heard they could make a profit from selling fresh lettuce to fancy rich-people restaurants, because they needed to make friends, because they wanted to win back a girlfriend’s respect.

It tied the community together is the point. It took this broken, vacant lot and made something from it. It’s imaginative and all-together doable.

The Fine Arts Academy plans to analyze the characters and perform pieces from each through dance, theatre or visual art to local elementary schools. Service learning through art is one of my favorites because art – performing and visual - is underrated in our society, yet totally transformative.

Other transformative projects:

Health awareness after reading Fast Food Nation
Awareness and presentations on domestic violence against women inspired by In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Education on how Of Mice and Men relates to the lives of these high school students

“The current fragmented reactionary approach to addressing the challenges of poverty does not work . . .

“A comprehensive approach is needed to truly move people forward. This comprehensive approach to addressing poverty can only be achieved through partnerships between organizations that currently serve and interact with people in poverty: educational, social service, judiciary, law enforcements, health care workers, etc.”

-Dr. Donna Beegle, founder of PovertyBridge

Orientation, of Service and Place

“I do solemnly affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;

That I will bear true faith and allegiance to do the same;

That I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion;

And that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of my service.”

This is the United States Oath of Service, which is taken by the President, Peace Corps members, military and foreign service personnel, and Corporation for National and Community Service volunteers, every year, all the time, worldwide, by the thousands.

AmeriCorps*VISTA draws all kinds, from economic, social, educational, religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds. Last week at pre-service orientation in Indianapolis there were straight-out-of-college graduates, and retirees who had served in Vietnam. Some had lived in poverty their whole lives, others said on those living in poverty, “I just don’t understand why people experience it.”

We discussed political and personal reasons of poverty, why we just can’t seem to get around it, and how we, as AmeriCorps members, as Volunteers in Service to America, will do our best to help people out of it.

In AmeriCorps, Peace Corps and other grass-roots not-for-profits this is achieved through capacity building. Poverty is best defined by a lack of resources. This can be financial, emotional, mental or social. Simply not having roles models—“having frequent access to adults who are nurturing and who don’t involve in self-destructive behavior”—is a poverty.

By transferring skills, products and relationships we’ll help our organization run smoothly and effectively. This in turn will help those seeking more resources.

It’s such a really difficult task, given that we have a year, and given that most of us aren’t from the community where we’ll be serving. Like I learned while in my 4,000-person village in Azerbaijan, it will take patience, patience, hard work, and getting to know people.

Across our landscape, from east to west coast and back to Middle America, with all our resources and capacity, we all agreed, “There’s just no reason poverty should exist.”