Boys and Girls Club Visit 2

Yesterday at the Boys and Girls Club I worked with the same girl as I had two weeks ago.  She had already had her interview completed last time I was there, and for this time she had gone through and underlined the parts that she thought were important to include in her Digital Story.  We went on the computer and she began to type what she wanted to say in her digital story.  She became frustrated after typing three words because she had not had received any training in typing in her school as I had and it took her a while to type one key at a time.  Although she is a very intelligent girl, this is when I most significantly noticed where the education system that she was in differed from the one I was in when I was in seventh grade.  When I was her age I had a year-long typing class in which we sat at computers for 45 minutes a day and completed a typing program in which we were tested on our accuracy and speed in typing.  Rather than have her spend more time on typing than thinking about what she wanted to say, I typed what she dictated to me for the story she wanted to tell.  Once she went through everything that she thought was important, her content only reached to the bottom of the first page.  I asked her to explain what the pearl of wisdom "if you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything" meant to her.  She then elaborated on how that phrase applied to her  Once she was out of ideas for adding to that, she asked me what else she could add.  I suggested that she add more about the woman she interviewed.  As she dictated to me how she knew her, I asked her what other positive qualities the woman she interviewed had and led the student to want to interview this woman.  At the end of the session, an observing student asked the girl i was working with if she could tell her what she had learned from me.  The girl from the Boys and Girls Club initially said that I taught her that longer was better.  She then proceeded to say that I tried to draw detail and more meaning out of what she had said previously in order to make it longer.  Also, the girl said that I made her think about what the significance of everything was that she said and how it all related together.  The observing student's questioning to the girl I was helping allowed me to realize that I actually had helped in her writing.  Not only did I reduce the amount of frustration she would have felt while typing, she also learned to elaborate on the points that most relate to her thesis- the "pearl of wisdom".