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Where there is no vision, people perish. Proverbs 29:18 In a city with a 38% high school graduation rate, the graduation of each student is an achievement. But what happens to these students? The ones who succeed. Do they truly succeed? Do they survive in a world which diverges sharply from the one in which they have grown up? In high school, they had a comfort blanket of friends and families who shared their neighborhoods, their joys, and their struggles, but after high school, for those who continue to college, the blanket begins to tear at the edges. These young men and women have to decide which threads hold the fabric of their current lives together and which threads are corrupting it. When one of the Boys and Girls Club directors approached me, she described a young woman in the situation I described above. She beat the odds. She graduated from high school. But she faced the danger of failing out of college. I enter where the fabric is almost torn through to help this young women—Marisa—sew up the edges. The challenge that faces her is one that faces too many freshmen college students. She entered college with the eager anticipation that every new student experiences. But her anticipation was different from the nervous feeling that I felt. I was not the first in my family to go to college. She was. Faced with academic, social, and some personal struggles, her grades began to slip, and she could not resurrect them. This summer our job is to work together to pass an on-line mathematics course. But I think that we both realize that her job is to pass the course and learn how to pass through college with minimal scars from the challenges she will face. Bruises are a normal part of growing up, but bruises fade. Scares are indelible, and she and I both know that we can afford the bruises that come from a journey toward success but not the scars from failure. We spent the first day working patiently through the homework. My job was to simultaneously observe and tutor. As we worked through the math problems, I watched her. The job of every tutor is to identify academic weaknesses and then to identify the cause for the weakness whether it is a poor teacher, an insecurity, or an academic roadblock. In the case of Marisa, I noticed a slight lack of confidence. She expressed her pride that she was the first in her family to attend college. But she also shared her worry that she would not graduate from college. I could see a young woman struggling through the math problems, but she kept her head down with a focus not always seen in students with academic difficulties. But the bowed head was the signal I needed. Marisa wanted to learn, but she needed to know how to learn. The next day we worked another two hours on math, and then I closed the book. I began asking her the questions that she needed to ask herself. What are your biggest accomplishments? What are your goals? What are your biggest obstacles and hurdles? Where do you see yourself in one month, one semester, one year, and four years? For an hour we sat. She spoke, and I typed. We printed the paper, and she signed and dated it. She wants to graduate from college, secure a job, and work with children, but she sees the hurdles in the path. She is proud that she has not succumbed to the temptations of her peers. She is not a teen mom nor is she addicted to drugs, but she sees her social life as a possible obstacle to success. She had reached the same conclusion I had reached. She had the drive, but she lacked the direction. And my goal this summer is to teach her to sew the fabric of her own life, and to show her that people do not perish when there is a vision. |
