Winn Elementary
D'Adrian told me she wished I were her mother.
I rubbed antiseptic into the welts in her hands,
Made with the finger nails
And hard eyes of another student
During the contained chaos of recess.
I don't understand this since I am often impatient with her,
With all of them.
It makes me shake inside at the end of the day.
I am perfect and change their lives
Because I can demonstrate the uppercase "I"
In cursive on the board.
They love it when I wear my hair down.
Samiya found a long strand of it lost on her notebook,
Wound it up around a pencil
And said it was good luck.
Everything I give them is relished
And decorated with waxy crayons,
Word searches or the same coloring sheet
As last time.
I feel so imperfect.
And every time they do their work,
They forget to write their names.
—Natasha Marra
Natasha Marra, Member 2003–2004
In August of 2002, I moved to Austin from New York after accepting a position as a tutor for ACEE. Getting settled in Texas was tougher than I expected. I didn't foresee the ant infestations or the ever-confusing Austin roadways, and I totally underestimated the summer heat. I saw my many adaptations to these differences as metaphors for the Northeasterner getting used to a very foreign place.
My job required an even harder adjustment. Before starting work, I didn't know exactly what the AmeriCorps experience would entail. What I found within my first month was somewhat of a slap in the face. I was placed in Winn Elementary, a school serving a low-income area of Austin. The long hours of tutoring, assisting in the classroom, and lesson planning during the school day exhausted me.
By 2:45, I was rarely in the best mood to help out with the after-school program, where I was responsible for tutoring almost twenty third-graders in small groups for about 45 minutes daily. I was both stressed and tired, and the students tried my patience with their giddy energy. I never before considered myself to have a short fuse, but I was pretty quick to snap when the students weren't focusing on their work.
I always felt badly for being short with them. Still, they never held grudges against me. They actually seemed to hold me in pretty high regard. I impressed them with such abilities as performing an uppercase "I" in cursive on the board and teaching new math strategies. Never have I had such a captivated audience.
Within a couple of months, I became much more patient and able to manage. By the last day of the after-school program in December, I saw that I might have learned more from these third-graders than they had from me. I now know the value of giving children attention and of applauding their accomplishments; even the smallest praise can give a student the much-needed confidence to achieve academically. I have so many reasons to go to work every day. Most importantly, I realize what a good decision it was to work for ACEE in the first place. It was the hardest and most enlightening adjustment I ever made.