First Day at Clemente

Jan. 25, 3 hours 15 minutes spent at Roberto Clemente

Clemente Learning Development Center has about 100 students originally from schools all over the Ann Arbor - Ypsilanti area. Each class has 15 students, who are not divided by grades. I assisted in two periods of Terry Carpenter's history class with three other 826Michigan volunteers.

The students' long-term project is to write an imagined history textbook. Terry has two periods of students working on this project on Tuesday's with volunteers.

Some of the students at Clemente

Katie, the 826 volunteer coordinator, is funded through Americorps.

In each period, Terry started off with a short introduction and examples on propaganda posters that were designed to generate homeland support for World War I. He also had students read letters home from soldiers on the horrors -- and rats -- of life in the trenches.

Students had the option of creating their own propaganda posters (from images they cut from magazines) or writing imagined letters from the front. In the first period, I worked with students on their letters in the library, and in the second period, I worked with those on posters.

The two periods couldn't have been more different. As Terry explained, the second period students would be much more disruptive with about half of them in special education. Getting them to focus at all was particularly problematic. Yet he soldiered on, going over the material and resisting kicking anyone out of the class. A third of the students in that period simply went to sleep or refused to engage in the project.

Those in the first period were surprisingly engaged in their letters. Though chatty as teenagers will be, they participated in some fashion. Obviously, some wrote longer with more focus than others. The girls interestingly, decided to come at the project not as a soldier but the spouse at home. One wrote an epistolary exchange between husband and wife, who was a nurse in a hospital for wounded veterans. From returning soldiers, the wife was getting information that her husband censored form his letters, a very original idea I thought.

I felt like I offered some contribution, not through editing, but helping students work through their approach to the writing. Broad brush stuff.

Some notes:

Several of the students were football players from their respective high schools and are allowed to stay on their teams even while attending Clemente.

Clemente does not issue diplomas. Seniors who 'graduate' receive diplomas from their respective high schools.