East Jerusalem School

Jason and I volunteer at the East Jerusalem School every Wednesday morning. This is a little snipit into the experiences.....
The day began differently as expected; after rushing to get Jason up and searching for our ride, we realized late that we had to run to the busses and get to East Jerusalem. After getting on the bus, we crossed our fingers and hoped our stop would be obvious; it was not. So, we then had an extra 15 minute walk to the school… only being 30 minutes late! Needless to say, it was an interesting start to the day. Then Jason and I were assigned to help four third graders with reading—four of the six we had last week. Anas, Admiral, Nadim, and Omar slowly read through a poem about never giving up. After a few minutes, it was Nadim’s turn to read. He could barely get through the first line. The other boys chuckled and whispered “it’s easy; I know this word!” while Nadim embarrassedly tried to sound out words with our help. Jason and I decided it would be best to separate the four into two, leaving me with the better of the four readers. As we returned the kids to the room, each boy was getting through paragraphs and reading much more confidently than before and I was struck by how effected they were by the other boys and the teacher; I guess that is one of the reasons why we are there. As we talked to the teacher, she was shocked that the boys could read at all. She told us that we would probably need to go back to the alphabet with them, but, when they were with us, they were reading paragraphs (slowly, mind you, but they were making progress). I was struck at the way the teacher’s attitude toward these boys affected their reading; they knew she did not expect anything from them, so they performed to that level. When Jason and I had confidence in them, they got better. When they were done with reading, we worked with three of the boys on math. We were working on subtracting and borrowing; once something was explained to them individually, they started understanding the concept. It was a competitive ordeal, but by the end of the period, the boys were starting to grasp the concepts on their own! Finally we worked on spelling with some of the fourth graders. One of the words was Massachusetts (I told them I did not even know how to spell it!) We started sounding out words, and I became aware of some of the difficult rules in the English language—I quickly became more thankful for growing up with this language. Then Jason came in and thought of a game for them to play... needless to say, he became their favorite. Even after the difficult morning, the day still turned into a blessed one.