What I Do As A Volunteer Tutor In Our County’s Juvenile Facility

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As regular readers of this blog know (see How I’m Spending My Time Now That I’m Retired From Classroom Teaching), in addition to writing and playing Pickleball, I’ve been working as a volunteer tutor at our county’s Juvenile Facility, as well as being a volunteer tutor at an elementary school working with ELL Newcomers.

I thought readers might, or might not, be interested in hearing about my work at the county.

First, I need to say that I’m quite impressed with the facility itself and the quality and attitude of the officers working there.  A sense of caring for the youth is pretty obvious.

My time there is divided in half.  I spend the first hour each day working in the “pod” containing the younger youth who are working online to complete high school classes.  They primarily work on an asynchronous program which I suspect is as good and as bad as all online asynchronous programs are.  There is a teacher supervising them in the facility, and I have been impressed that they receive narrative feedback on their work from the online program relatively quickly, though I don’t know if it’s all AI-driven (I suspect it might be AI and then human-edited).  There is also off-line work available, though it seems like most of the youth prefer working on the computer.

While there, I’ll sit next to one and help them for awhile before switching to another youth.  Our conversations are sometimes about the academic work, sometimes about their lives and interests.  There are very few youth in my teaching career that I haven’t been able to develop some kind of a connection with, and that skill has served me well here.

Next, I move to the older youth.  When they have access to computers, I’m able to help them with online community college classes.  When they don’t have computer access, I’ve purchased books of their choice for them (approved by Facility staff) and we read and discuss a chapter from the book each week.  I’ve encouraged some of them to write about their lives, and that seems to have inspired a couple to start.

I’ve been pretty impressed with the titles they’ve selected: The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho; The Magic of Thinking Big by David Schwartz, Mastery by Robert Greene,  The Miracle Of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, The Psychology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained are a few of them.

It doesn’t take me very long to read a chapter from each one during the week and come up with some questions.  At one point, I tried asking ChatGPT to develop discussion questions, and they were absolutely terrible!

Our discussions seem to go well – the youth seem to get something out of them, and I enjoy the time.

Every other month, I come in during their PE time and we have three-point and free-throw shooting contests (I’m not allowed to actually play a basketball game).  Just like when I was teaching, interacting with students outside of a classroom setting does wonders to solidify relationships.  Playing ball here is like going to see a high school student at my old school playing in a game or acting in a play.

Hopefully, my presence helps a bit….