The last couple weeks the high school students have been coming to the time I volunteer with the middle school students. Once I was helping one of the high school students write a research paper. I was getting so incredibly frustrated because he was not focusing and did not do any research before hand. I felt like he expected me to write the entire thing for him, and I was not about to do that. But after being frustrated for a while I realized maybe he is just insecure about his lack of knowledge of how to write and organize a research paper. So he is being stubborn because he feels embarrassed. And this made me so incredibly sad that he felt that way. It reminded me about what we learned in ling 1000 about linguistic insecurity. About how maybe he felt his language was beneath the "standard language" and felt insecure about it. After that moment I was no longer frustrated but focused more on giving him the skills to write this research paper and more in the future.
This was the first experience I've had at family learning center where I was very frustrated with a student but it ended up working out and we finished his outline for the research paper. YAY!
