Causecast

Causecast’s spotlight on volunteers continues today with retired professor Lee Carroll!

She has found her place—tutoring children in writing each week at 826LA in Venice, California. Carroll has spent her life teaching reading and writing as a public school English teacher and a college professor, so it’s no wonder why she loves to help kids learn to love writing too. She especially enjoys how 826LA puts a new spin on tutoring with creative and fun ways to practice writing skills.

On the children and how she works with them:

“Slowly and carefully, Alfred untied the ribbon, and Jenny’s head fell off.” And then the six-year-olds I am tutoring at 826LA West begin arguing about who gets to read next from In a Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories. I love it. Edwin, Lizette, and Montserrat are reading and writing hard words that would have stumped them only eight months before when I started volunteering. I’ve been showing up most Wednesday afternoons from 3:00 to 5:30 to help local kids 6-18 with homework, writing and reading. When I have had the time, I’ve also written essays and poetry with middle school students who come to our site during the school day on field trips and worked one-on-one with high school students writing in their English classrooms, a rare luxury in LA public schools.

On starting to volunteer:

From my first day, I felt at home in our tutoring space at 826LA West in Venice—a large, open-beamed, high-ceilinged room with wood floors, big windows, heavy library tables, a bit of the old Venice quirky style, and lots, and lots, and lots of books. I was first attracted to 826, like an internet date, by a random comment on YELP under “Volunteer Opportunities.” A tutor wrote that after a few sessions students greeted her enthusiastically by name and always asked when she was coming back. Well, everybody, including tutors, likes to have fans. Now I’m sometimes flustered as well as flattered when four or five kids are yelling “Lee, Lee, Lee” all at once. We can get a bit rowdy at 826.

On volunteering as a way of life:

I’ve actually done quite a bit of volunteering in the past 10 years, but I initially had to be dragged into homeless shelters and juvenile detention sites by the students and colleagues I worked with at Pepperdine University. I thought I didn’t have time to volunteer, I felt awkward when I didn’t know exactly what to do, I didn’t think I could really “make a difference” with only a few hours a week or a month. Father Greg Boyle, the inspiring founder of Homeboy Industries in downtown LA, changed my perspective. His advice? Just show up, learn people’s names, listen. Be present. Now repeat again next time. Don’t expect to turn lives around in two hours. That only happens in the movies. Father G says he doesn’t change people, they change themselves if and when they want to. He simply stands with them; he’s on their side.

Sure kids can be rowdy or bored or just plain uncooperative some of the time, but I’m ridiculously thrilled by small things.

Take June, a smart, articulate, and funny 11th grader at Dorsey High School. His character peeped out of his first draft of a college application essay, and we spent two hours last week talking and revising to make that image sharper. What’s it like to be 16 in urban LA these days? Most teenagers, even in our own families, answer in monosyllables. But brainstorming specific experiences to include in their writing, students give their teachers and tutors a perspective that many adults don’t have.

826LA makes volunteering easy. All I have to do is follow Father G’s advice and show up.