Since October 2014, I’ve been volunteering three hours a week with Pathways to Education. This programme supports students academically and emotionally in Vancouver’s Strathcona and Hastings neighbourhoods. Pathways has had astounding success in other Canadian regions, and I feel honoured to be a part of their new learning community in Vancouver.
A story: Last Spring, I was working with a student on his grade 8 math homework. He didn’t like the subject and quickly stopped working on it. Since I couldn’t force him to complete the homework, I decided to open up an atlas of the world with him. We looked at the map legends, and started measuring distances using thumb widths (i.e., if 1 thumb is 100 km, then 3 thumbs is 300 km). He enjoyed this linkage to the real world, and his attitude towards math improved. In subsequent weeks, he did his math homework without protest. I hope that he was more engaged because I invested in his progress and he didn’t want to let himself – or me – down.
