Being a Writing Mentor

A couple of months ago at the beginning of the school year, my friend Mark put out a request on Facebook looking for writing mentors for his AP English class.  It would mean a weekly commitment to read a student's essay and critique it.  Supposedly 15-20 minutes a week.  I thought it sounded like fun, so I volunteered.  I asked Donovan if he wanted to do it too, and he also volunteered.

So for the past several weeks, we've been writing mentors.  We each got assigned a student, and we will be working with that same student for the whole year.  Most of the kids in Mark's class don't speak English as their primary language, and don't have the at-home resources to support them.  Thus the need for writing mentors for each student!  My student's name is Wendy, and she writes fairly well.  Some weeks her essays have been pretty painful to read, either from a grammatical standpoint, or because she was so far off topic.  I try to be very thorough in my comments and editing, so that she can understand what's not working and improve.  So far, most weeks it has taken me 30-60 minutes to do justice to the request.

When I think about these students (and I really don't know that much about them), I think about how much support was available to me as I was going through school, and how these kids don't have that.  Kudos to Mark for setting up this program for them, to really give them the best chance he can on their AP exams at the end of the year.

Tuesdays are the day that we are supposed to read the essays.  Today Donovan and I are in Cabo, and this afternoon we decided to delay going down to the pool a little bit and get our essays "out of the way."  We were pleasantly surprised to find that instead of essays this week, we had a letter from our student, updating us on how they're doing so far.  Our assignment was to just write them back!  Wendy wrote me that she's been having a few rough weeks with all her schoolwork, and also that she's changed what she wants to major in in college.  She also thanked me for being her writing mentor, and for pushing her so hard.  I encouraged her to stay in communication with her teachers and let them know when she's feeling overwhelmed.  And I let her know that all her teachers and I are there to support her.

With an hour a week of my time, I am impacting a young life.  How cool is that?