"Who we are and who we are meant to become is a collection of constant creation and revision...I am still a work in progress."

Sunday, April 29, 2012

CFL Frustration

"Frustration, although quite painful at times, is a very positive and essential part of success."
                                                                                                           -Bo Bennett

While even though my time at the Center for Literacy has been tremendously successful, there is always room for improvement.  I feel that my main concern with the service site from the past year is that there is a general lack of communication.  I can honestly not remember one week where each and every tutor was matched up with their learner.  Either a tutor missed and did not send an e-mail or a learner did not call Scott or Mark to let them know that they could not make the session.   There were even a few cases in which learners were not assigned for some of our classmates.  This led to a lot of down time for them,  since Scott or Mark rarely needed help with anything else.  Those select students felt awkward as they believed that they were impeding in on other students' service experiences if they helped them tutor.  This basically acted as an excuse for those students to sit around while the rest of us tutored for 3 hours.  Therefore, proving to be a major problem because some of our fellow hawks were not able to have the same enriching experience.  Whether it be geared towards learners or tutors,  I firmly believe that missing service next year should be enforced more seriously.

Behind each mistake there is an important lesson ready to be shared.  So in order to counteract this criticism, I would like to offer some ideas which could possibly help improve this service site.  Especially since I had such a meaningful experience at the Center For Literacy,  I would love it if other students could similarly enjoy their time at the CFL.  If a student would miss a session at the CFL, I feel that they should not only be responsible to make up that day but also read an article from the NYTimes about a social issue and respond to it in relation to service.  That way, students could still learn and reflect about the topic at hand, even if they can not have that first-hand experience.