Roses are red, Violets are blue, B is the bomb, Allie thinks so too!

On Tuesday we had a great drive over to the Boys and Girls club- good tunes, good friends, good road snacks- best trip ever. Once we got to the Boy and Girls Club we were given our student. We'll call her B for now. She was in the 10 grade and seemed a little bit shy when we first met her. She wasn't really too sure about her story yet, she was going to do her interview later this week, and she was going armed with a digital camera and a sheet of questions that she had been given to ask. She didn't seem particularly nervous about it, and the only concern she expressed was with the technological aspect of the assignment. She wasn't sure how to use all the computer programs, and we assured her, with our own stories of surprising technological success, that it really wasn't as hard as it seemed, and she would be just fine! Naturally when we finished answering all of her questions and had shown her a few examples of digital stories, we started talking about boys... I mean, you can only talk about digital story telling for so long right!?

I thought it was really helpful to assist people who were not our peers and were not part of the university setting. I think its easy to assume a certain level of understanding when we are on campus because we are naturally inclined to think that our fellow Richmond students are intelligent, but when we go off campus, we have to learn to talk to people in a new way. We were not dealing with college students, rather we were talking to kids still in their early teens- there is a definite incongruity between the levels of "literacy" in high school and college students. We had to use terms and phrases that would be a bit easier to understand. It is a really good way to practice becoming a good teacher- I think that a really important element of successful teaching is to be able explain things in a variety of ways. Not everyone understands or absorbs information in the same way, and as writing consultants we will have to be aware of that.

I had a great time at the Boys and Girls Club- though its a time commitment, I think it'll be really rewarding in the end. Me and Allie are rooting for B all the way!