What Can YOU Do For Your Country?

This weeks reading was "In The Service Of What? The Politics of Service Learning" by Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer

Extended Comments: 

I'm going to use Heathers Service Learning blog as the discussion of mine! Hope you don't mind Heather! Heather first started off by telling a story of a service learning project that she had done earlier in High School. What struck me is her statement of "it was good what we did but just a band-aid for the problem." I agree with her statement because we can do so many things for our country, our community, but if it's just us doing them, or our small group, the problem will keep coming back waiting for us to fix it again. If we raise awareness, then others, possibly everyone will get involved and be a better service to whatever task is at hand.

I also agree with how this Service Learning project has really impacted me far more than anything else. I was SO nervous my first day too but it all went downhill and now I'm so comfortable and actually am starting to love the kids I work with. I see such intelligence and hope and dreams and it makes me want to help them get to any place they want to be! I feel as though I didn't have a great understanding of other races than my own...or maybe I assumed all races were the same but being swallowed by a school that has a 9% white population, you realize that these are kids exactly as they are, a different race. I absolutely love it! The most important thing to me after reading In The Service of What was how am I really impacting them? How am I really serving them. Yes I guess this time is for me and is supposed to help me further my college credits and volunteer hours but I don't look at it that way. I am working with kids teaching them what I love. Heather talked about how her kids aren't ESL kids, they are her students...and I couldn't agree more! I don't look at my students and call them my African kids or Hispanic kids, they're my students and I'm serving them to the best of my ability, not for me but for them.

Through this service learning project, I think a lot about Jonathan Kozol and his book entitled Amazing Grace. I think about his interaction with a completely different culture and how he observes, he looks where no one wants to look in order to educate others of whats right down the street from them.

In class I'd like to discuss more ways that we can better service learning and how we can do more after this service learning project. I don't want it to end here, I know it won't but I want to work on everything about service learning.