I always post first! :-)

Directly in the beginning of this week’s reading something popped out to me as relating to my service learning. “The narcissist wants to be whole, good, pure, and perfect. There are two ways to do this. Either one lowers one’s standards of wholeness…until they correspond to one’s miserable self. Or one raises one’s miserable self as high as one possibly can so that one comes a little closer to these standards.”(p 63) This is a problem with most of the kids at County and Phoenix in a general sense (not just morally as described in the book). There are students (a majority of them) who have decided that they are in this school because they can’t do any better and their lives are already doomed. Then there are the students who understand that they can do better and become like the students at regular high schools. These are the students that eventually leave County or Phoenix with a degree or transfer back into the traditional school system.

What I feel my main goal as a tutor there is to show the students that they are better than they think they are. These kids don’t need to be “bad students,” but that is how a lot of them see themselves. I love it when a student can answer something that I can’t, in class because it shows them that they are of just as high of an intelligence level as a college student. The students at County think they are there because there are the “stupid kids” when in actuality, they have the potential of being smarter than students that come out of a regular high school. My job is not to show them this, but to have them figure it out on their own.

Loyalty is very important to the kids at County School. One reason is because of the gangs that exist and allegiance to one’s gang. The other allegiance is to the other kids that they are in school with. It seems like it is all of the students against the teacher. No one would ever want to be on the teacher’s side. Either all of the students are working or none of them are. They seem to do things as a pack. This might be the opposite thinking of whistleblowers. “Whistleblowers blow the whistle because they dread living with a corrupted self more than they dread isolation from others.” (p 90) The students I work with do fear isolation. It seems as though a kid at County would rather follow what the group wants to do rather than do the opposite (even if they know that what the group is doing is wrong).

I would like to propose an experiment. We hire some young people (after graduating high school of course) to come to County and pose as students. For a few weeks they talk with the kids and gain their trust and act similar to them. After a few weeks has passed what if these students (making up roughly half the class) started to do their work and listen to the teacher…would the rest follow?