Day to Day Service, an Update from Meg

A typical day of service means that I arrive at the school around 8:15, unless it is a Wednesday when I need to be at school at 7:30. My team always circles in our office at 8:30 and runs through readiness check, joys and ripples, and our agenda for the day. Our first class starts at 9:30, so for the next 45 minutes we have a different theme for each day. On Monday we write down all the students we worked with the week before, on Tuesdays we work on our Life After City Year plans, on Wednesdays we write in our Starfish logs, and on Thursdays we make sure everything is organized for the next week. At 9:27 the bell rings and everyone on my team heads to their first class.

My first class is a 10th grade African American history class. I take two students out of that class and we go back to the City Year office and work on worksheets or read passages out of the book. After 2nd period I go to Ms. LeeHim’s class, which is a 10th grade English class with most of the same students as my second period. I work in-class there, usually working with a few students on the book they are reading at the time. Right now they are reading The Giver, and filling out a packet as they read. When that class ends I head to my period 4/5 class, a freshmen physical science class. For this class I walk around and make sure that everyone stays on task and is copying down notes. After that class ends, I have a half hour to work on different tasks, like planning the Book Club that we are starting at Overbrook soon. Then it’s lunch and I finish the school day in another freshmen physical science class, working with one student who has trouble seeing the board.

Then it’s time for tutoring in the library. This is my favorite time of the day, since we have a few students who come regularly and it’s just more relaxed atmosphere than being in class. This is the time when students talk to you about stuff unrelated to school, and they really begin to open up. The students never like to leave tutoring, but around 4:30 we finish up and they leave. For the next hour and fifteen minutes my team takes care of different tasks. For example, every month we publish a newsletter to give to students and parents, so everyone has a different article that they have to write. This is also the time to have team meetings once a week and plan our next 90% Club event. 90% Club is an initiative with our sponsor, Villa, that rewards students who come to school 9 out of 10 days. We collect attendance once every two weeks and have different prizes for the students who were present. It’s a great program but requires a lot of planning. At 5:45 my team will break and everyone goes home. And that is a day in the life of a City Year corps member serving on the Villa team at Overbrook High School. J

Meg, 19, corps member, Villa team at Overbrook High School