“My Wish: Once Upon a School”
Instructions
In a two to three page double spaced essay, after viewing My Wish: Once Upon a School (2008 TEDTalks video, 24 minutes in length, captioned, download a descriptive transcript), answer the following:
· Identify the core problems the work of Dave Eggers and his colleagues addressed by creating an after-school study space
· Describe exactly how this initiative epitomizes mezzo-level advocacy and action.
· Analyze the problem(s) which are addressed by 826 Velencia Tutoring Center and describe the mezzo advocacy skills used to create this community change.
· Finally, if you could impact change on an agency or community level, what would you work to actualize? What skills would you
ing to this mezzo advocacy project?
This is the Link to the video below:
https:
youtu.be/qCGOyvq7x1Y
Also, I attached the descriptive one. Please use APA citation For this video and answer all the bullet questions.
Descriptive Transcript for My wish: Once upon a school
This descriptive transcript describes the video. Content in italics provides guidance for what is happening on screen. The majority of the talk is the speaker is presenting to an audience on a stage.
Speaker: Dave Eggers, Fe
uary 2008, Monterey, California
Thank you so much everyone from TED, and Chris and Amy in particular. I cannot believe I'm here. I have not slept in weeks. Neil and I were sitting there comparing how little we've slept in anticipation for this. I've never been so nervous -- and I do this when I'm nervous, I just realized. (Laughter)
00:26 Slide displays a store front called, “826 Valencia.”
So, I'm going to talk about sort of what we did at this organization called 826 Valencia, and then I'm going to talk about how we all might join in and do similar things.
00:34 Recorded at Ted
Back in about 2000, I was living in Brooklyn, I was trying to finish my first book, I was wandering around dazed every day because I wrote from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m. So I would walk around in a daze during the day. I had no mental acuity to speak of during the day, but I had flexible hours. In the Brooklyn neighborhood that I lived in, Park Slope, there are a lot of writers -- it's like a very high per capita ratio of writers to normal people. Meanwhile, I had grown up around a lot of teachers. My mom was a teacher, my sister became a teacher and after college so many of my friends went into teaching. And so I was always hearing them talk about their lives and how inspiring they were, and they were really sort of the most hard-working and constantly inspiring people I knew.
But I knew so many of the things they were up against, so many of the struggles they were dealing with. And one of them was that so many of my friends that were teaching in city schools were having trouble with their students keeping up at grade level, in their reading and writing in particular. Now, so many of these students had come from households where English isn't spoken in the home, where a lot of them have different special needs, learning disabilities. And of course they're working in schools which sometimes and very often are under-funded. And so they would talk to me about this and say, "You know, what we really need is just more people, more bodies, more one-on-one attention, more hours, more expertise from people that have skills in English and can work with these students one-on-one."
Now, I would say, "Well, why don't you just work with them one-on-one?" And they would say, "Well, we have five classes of 30 to 40 students each. This can lead up to 150, 180, 200 students a day. How can we possibly give each student even one hour a week of one-on-one attention?" You'd have to greatly multiply the workweek and clone the teachers. And so we started talking about this. And at the same time, I thought about this massive group of people I knew: writers, editors, journalists, graduate students, assistant professors, you name it. All these people that had sort of flexible daily hours and an interest in the English word -- I hope to have an interest in the English language, but I'm not speaking it well right now. (Laughter) I'm trying. That clock has got me. But everyone that I knew had an interest in the primacy of the written word in terms of nurturing a democracy, nurturing an enlightened life. And so they had, you know, their time and their interest, but at the same time there wasn't a conduit that I knew of in my community to
ing these two communities together.
So when I moved back to San Francisco, we rented this building. And the idea was to put McSweeney's -- McSweeney's Quarterly, that we published twice or three times a year, and a few other magazines -- we were going to move it into an office for the first time. It used to be in my kitchen in Brooklyn. We were going to move it into an office, and we were going to actually share space with a tutoring center. So we thought, "We'll have all these writers and editors and everybody -- sort of a writing community -- coming into the office every day anyway, why don't we just open up the front of the building for students to come in there after school, get extra help on their written homework, so you have basically no border between these two communities?" So the idea was that we would be working on whatever we're working on, at 2:30 p.m. the students flow in and you put down what you're doing, or you trade, or you work a little bit later or whatever it is. You give those hours in the afternoon to the students in the neighborhood.
So, we had this place, we rented it, the landlord was all for it.
04:18 Mural of the history of the printed word. The image is unclear and so can’t be described further.
We did this mural, that's a Chris Ware mural, that basically explains the entire history of the printed word, in mural form -- it takes a long time to digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road. So we rented this space. And everything was great except the landlord said, "Well, the space is zoned for retail; you have to come up with something. You've gotta sell something. You can't just have a tutoring center." So we thought, "Ha ha! Really!" And we couldn't think of anything necessarily to sell, but we did all the necessary research. It used to be a weight room, so there were ru
er floors below, acoustic tile ceilings and fluorescent lights. We took all that down, and we found beautiful wooden floors, whitewashed beams and it had the look -- while we were renovating this place, somebody said, "You know, it really kind of looks like the hull of a ship." And we looked around and somebody else said, "Well, you should sell supplies to the working buccaneer." (Laughter)
And so this is what we did. So it made everybody laugh, and we said, "There's a point to that. Let's sell pirate supplies."
05:25 Photo of the pirate supply store.
This is the pirate supply store. You see, this is sort of a sketch I did on a napkin. A great carpenter built all this stuff and you see, we made it look sort of pirate supply-like.
05:35 [video edited for content] … and then right behind it we set up this space, which was the tutoring center. So right there is the tutoring center, and then behind the curtain were the McSweeney's offices, where all of us would be working on the magazine and book editing and things like that.
The kids would come in -- or we thought they would come in. I should back up. We set the place up, we opened up, we spent months and months renovating this place. We had tables, chairs, computers, everything. I went to a dot-com auction at a Holiday Inn in Palo Alto and I bought 11 G4s with a stroke of a paddle. Anyway, we bought 'em, we set everything up and then we waited. It was started with about 12 of my friends, people that I had known for years that were writers in the neighborhood. And we sat. And at 2:30 p.m. we put a sandwich board out on the front sidewalk and it just said, "Free Tutoring for Your English-Related and Writing-Related Needs -- Just Come In, It's All Free." And we thought, "Oh, they're going to storm the gates, they're gonna love it." And they didn't. And so we waited, we sat at the tables, we waited and waited. And everybody was becoming very discouraged because it was weeks and weeks that we waited, really, where nobody came in.
And then somebody alerted us to the fact that maybe there was a trust gap, because we were operating behind a pirate supply store. (Laughter) We never put it together, you know? And so then, around that time, I persuaded a woman named Nineveh Caligari, a longtime San Francisco educator -- she was teaching in Mexico City, she had all the experience necessary, knew everything about education, was connected with all the teachers and community members in the neighborhood -- I convinced her to move up from Mexico City where she was teaching. She took over as executive director. Immediately, she made the inroads with the teachers and the parents and the students and everything, and so suddenly it was actually full every day.
And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.
7:44 Photo of the learning space, populated with mentors and students working closely.
You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher. And so most of these students, English is not spoken in the home. They come there, many times their parents -- you can't see it, but there's a church pew that I bought in a Berkeley auction right there -- the parents will sometimes watch while their kids are being tutored. So that was the basis of it, was one-on-one attention. And we found ourselves full every day with kids. If you're on Valencia Street within those few blocks at around 2 p.m., 2:30 p.m., you will get run over, often, by the kids and their big backpacks, or whatever, actually running to this space, which is very strange, because it's school, in a way. But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the "Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help," or something like that. It was 826 Valencia. First of all, it was a pirate supply store, which is insane. And then secondly, there's a publishing company in the back. And so our interns were actually working at the same tables very often, and shoulder-to-shoulder, computer-next-to-computer with the students.
8:45 Another image of the learning space, populated with mentors and students working closely.
And so it became a tutoring center -- publishing center, is what we called it -- and a writing center. They go in, and they might be working with a high school student actually working on a novel -- because we had very gifted kids, too. So there's no stigma. They're all working next to each other. It's all a creative endeavor. They're seeing adults. They're modeling their behavior. These adults, they're working in their field. They can lean over, ask a question of one of these adults and it all sort of feeds on each other. There's a lot of cross-pollination. The only problem, especially for the adults working at McSweeney's who hadn't necessarily bought into all of this when they signed up, was that there was just the one bathroom. (Laughter) With like 60 kids a day, this is a problem.
9:42 series of 4 photos. The first photo is a mentor working with 2 students. The remaining three photos show a mentor working with one student.
But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention -- they go home, they're finished. They don't stall. They don't do their homework in front of the TV. They're allowed to go home at 5:30 p.m., enjoy their family, enjoy other ho
ies, get outside, play. And that makes a happy family. A bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community. A bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world. So the key to it all is homework! (Laughter) (Applause) There you have it, you know -- one-on-one attention.
So we started off with about 12 volunteers, and