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(I have a weakness for Calvin and Hobbes and I think that this encompasses how I expected students to be at the alternative learning center)...

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Although I am done at PCYC... I won't forget the things that I learned there. Before this semester, I knew going into EDHD 3001 that it would either turn me off from teaching or confirm my desire to teach. Now, after my service learning experience and EDHD 3001, I see so many exciting things happening in education and I truly feel that teaching is my calling.

Right now, I am also working in the Welcome Center at a Minnesota Internship charter high school, so I will continue to work with inner city high school kids. I truly enjoy the work I do there and even though I am not taking another service learning class this year, my job keeps me in the school atmosphere. I hope to continue to work in schools throughout my college career, even before I am a teacher.

During class, we often discussed what made a good or bad teacher. I think that it really comes down to the reasons and the commitment you have. I also think it comes down to how much teachers believe in their students as well.

I chose the image above because I believe it showcases good teaching style... and the image below to illustrate poor teaching style... I think that it is every teacher's responsibility to strive upward.

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Realizations and an important takeaway...

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Realizations and an important takeaway...

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Throughout the semester I realized how much relationships matter in the classroom!! This realization might seem obvious, but for me it really sunk in through the course of my tutoring experience. PYC is obviously designed to be relationship based and I saw it working every time I went in to tutor.

Throughout the semester, I often journaled about a particular teacher, who I will call Mr. Q* for privacy reasons. He had such a great connection with his students. Every time I was in his classroom, I saw students engaged and excited about material even after initial resistance. His students were so eager to please him and when a student came back after skipping school a few days, he wouldn't stop asking them why. He never let casual remarks like "I want to drop out" go. He always countered with "You wouldn't let me down like that." He laughed with his students but he also showed them the importance of learning. While teaching one more complicated concept, his students were complaining and asking why they had to learn it. He said, "You are all going to be nurses, engineers, teachers, doctors, or whatever someday. You need to be able to think critically. This is about expanding your mind!" The students would always tease him that he "did too much." He had high expectations for his students but they were eager to meet them. I've been in many classrooms and I've had or seen many great teachers but Mr. Q really embodied everything I think that someone should strive to be as a teacher. I honestly think that, even though I wasn't his student, I learned so much from him that I can take into my future career.

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Reality settles in: The good and the bad...

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Reality settles in: The good and the bad...

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I really loved the atmosphere of PYC. The teachers were passionate, engaged, and often knew their students quite personally. Teachers and students often had a friendly banter going on throughout class and even in the hallways. The small class sizes and the sometimes informal atmosphere created relationships that I witnessed as really inspiring. Sure, sometimes there was conflict, and I did witness one student walk out of a classroom and another being written up for inappropriate behavior. But it wasn't anymore frequent than at any other high school I've been to.

Something that wasn't so great was that sometimes I felt out of place. The small class sizes were really great but it also meant that, unless one particular student needed extensive help, students were always able to ask the teacher their questions directly. I did work with some students one-on-one, but I often I "floated" around classrooms and often I really felt like I didn't have all that much to do.  That being said, I would have loved to have been a more permanent member or to have visited PYC more frequently. I loved the atmosphere but I felt that I needed a more consistent role to really feel a part of it. I often didn't connect with students on a personal level and my relationship with them was friendly but distant. This could also be because of culture clashes with my students, as I've discussed in previous blog posts.

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Uploaded by PYC Arts & Technology High School on 2016-11-21.

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Classroom Setting... Just one thing I admired.

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Classroom Setting... Just one thing I admired.

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Although I don't have an exact picture of a PCYC classroom, the image above is very similar to what I saw while tutoring at PCYC. The student to teacher ratio was always less than 15:1. Most classrooms had less than 10 students. The building had large windows and many of the classrooms were well lit and airy. The desks were often set up at large tables or along the walls. None of the classrooms looked like what I was used to in my high school. It was a very interactive style of classroom and the students often spoke without raising their hands. Students were often allowed to listen to music or use their cell phones during class. I thought that this would distract students but the class sizes often countered this free policy. Often, students would be called out for not listening in class.

As I sat in these classrooms, and often enjoyed the banter between students and teachers, it reminded me of how Ayers wrote that "a large part of the work of teaching is constructing the laboratory for learning." Perhaps he was talking about elementary age kids, but in these classrooms, I felt like there had been a lot of good thought put into their structure and purpose.

I definitely saw the "flow" happening within these classrooms. I think the most surprising thing I saw was the interest the students demonstrated in what they were learning. It was normal for a teacher to write something on the board and for a student to ask, "but why?"

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I worked with many different students. They ranged from students who had simply missed one day of school and needed an explanation, to students in special education classrooms, to students doing intense remedial work in order to graduate high school.

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I spent Monday mornings as a tutor at PCYC throughout the semester. The students I worked with were secondary school students. I worked with a variety of students, some more consistently than others. Although I am an English major, I most often tutored students in math and science.

Before I started, I really did not know what to expect. I had never been inside of an alternative learning center and I was clueless as to where the students came from or what they were like. I thought that they would be difficult to work with and that they might even look down on me. I'll be honest, a large part of beginning tutoring was getting over some insecurities. I have never been a super outgoing person and I thought that it would be even more difficult to connect and relate to students of completely different backgrounds than mine. In addition to this, I was also around the same age as most of the students.

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What is the Plymouth Christian Youth Center?

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What is the Plymouth Christian Youth Center?

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Also called "PCYC" or "PYC," the Plymouth Christian Youth Center is, among other things, an alternative learning center. The building (shown above), also has a free clinic and several social workers on site. The organization also works with the Capri Theater and after school programs. On their website, they state that they were "founded in 1954 to serve children and youth in the inner city of Minneapolis."