Pencil Projects Makes My Heart Happy
One of the main reasons I came to Nashville is because my guidance counselor told me that Nashville was extremely service-minded. That probably sounded like the cheesiest, most made-up sentence about choosing a university that you’ve ever heard, but it’s true! I love service and you can’t stop me from helping people! Ha!
Sassy attitude aside, one of my favorite organizations that I’ve gotten involved with this semester is a national organization called Pencil Projects, a group that equips college students with the tools to tutor kids in struggling schools. The organization performs background checks on the students and coordinates carpools to the Nashville schools for the volunteers based on their schedules because many Vanderbilt students are sans car (me!). I figured that since I tutored a wee bit in high school, I would be a pro at filling children’s brains with knowledge. How wrong I was.
First semester, I was assigned to a carpool with a senior and another freshman, both of whom were pre-med. An HOD student myself, who knows almost nothing about the life of a pre-med student, I happily soaked in all of the knowledge about med school applications and impossible Chemistry exams during our 15-minute rides to and from Bordeaux Elementary School. Our little group of three tutors was assigned to Mrs. Collins’s 1st grade class, and I had the pleasure of attempting to teach math to Rondrick and Norman, two children who apparently didn’t understand the concept of sitting in a chair for longer than ten seconds. Second semester, I ended up at the exact same elementary school in the same classroom with the same two kids (plus a few more). Here’s what the Pencil Projects crew taught me my freshman year:
1. Sometimes it takes a whole semester to learn the difference between addition and subtraction when you’re 6. (“You mean subtract means the same thing as ‘take away’?”)
2. Math Bingo is more fun than a worksheet any day, but it does produce more tears when two of the three kids don’t win. When did they stop believing the phrase, “Everyone’s a winner!”?
3. If a service project is something you really care about, you need to put in outside hours to do your very best at it. I spent a lot of time making flashcards and tutoring program completion certificates while I probably should have been sleeping, but it really paid off.
4. Often times, you gain more from service than you give, even if you intended for it to be the other way around. This experience has opened my eyes to the huge problems in education that are not only present in Tennessee but nationwide, and Pencil Projects is the way that I am contributing and leaving my mark on the lives and educations of a few children in Nashville.
I really hope that my Pencil Project babies learned to count a little less on their fingers and to recognize the greater-than and less-than signs, but even more than that, I hope that I will remember what a blessing they were in my life. They kept me grounded week-to-week and reminded me to live life joyfully. Pencil Projects makes my heart happy.
