Soc 145 Podcast

Laura Gazarian, an accounting major, volunteers as a Reading Corps tutor at John Muir Elementary School. She helps Spanish, Russian, and Armenian-speaking newcomers improve their language skills. Laura tutors 13 students in 30-minute sessions, focusing on letter sounds and sound awareness. She sees the positive impact of her work and wants to continue helping others after her service with College Corps. Laura emphasizes the importance of communication with coaches and suggests free tutors outside of schools and after-school programs for students in need. She believes that many people require assistance but are unable to access it. Laura's biggest lesson is the significance of helping those who struggle. Hi, everyone. I am Laura Gazarian. My major is accounting, and I'm volunteering as a Reading Corps tutor. I haven't had volunteering experience before. I signed up for College Corps to help people who struggle and need help. I serve at John Muir Elementary School as a tutor. The supervisor of the school is Vyhanush Nazarian, and the school was built in 1926. The school, as I noticed, has a lot of Spanish, Russian, and Armenian speaker kids, and most of them are newcomers who need help in improving their language skills. I am the only tutor working on my site. I get to my site at 8.15 on Mondays and Wednesdays, and the first tutoring session starts at 8.30. First, I go to the classroom, where I have to pick up the kids. And after picking them up from their classroom, I take them to the classroom that I was provided. With the first pair of students, we start with learning the letter sounds and sound awareness. I was provided with the scripts for those interventions, which makes it easier for me to deliver the lessons to the kids. After finishing the tutoring session with the first couple, I take them back to the classrooms and go to the next classroom to pick up the next couple for the next tutoring session. During the day, I have 13 students that I provide tutoring to. The tutoring sessions usually have to last 20 minutes, but we managed to make the sessions last for 30 minutes. My last tutoring session ends at 2, and after that, I have time to analyze what we did with the kids and where are they at. The most exciting moment for me is when the kids are coming to my classroom very excited and don't want to leave it. It makes me understand that I am doing everything right. In the beginning, it was challenging because some of the kids didn't want to continue the session because they were too tired and didn't want to learn at that time. But you have to find a way to connect with them and show them that you can relate to them. Service is important because you can change the community by helping others who need your help. It is important to understand your own values before beginning your service because it helps to guide yourself in your daily life activities. An advice that I would like to give to the future volunteers would be to communicate with their coaches if they need help with anything, because from my experience, I can tell that they will be there to help and support you. One suggestion that I have would be having free tutors outside of schools. Most of the tutors are paid, and some parents don't have the money to send their kids to tutoring. So I think that this is a great idea. And also having a tutor that would have an after school program is a great idea. The students that need help could stay after school to receive tutoring. After serving for several months now, I think that I already made a difference in the community. I see that the kids benefited from the tutoring sessions, and that was my goal. For the second half of my service, I plan on helping the students to strengthen their skills in reading and overall their language skills. When I finish my service with College Corps, I would like to find a way to continue my service because when I see those kids struggling to fit into the community because of the language barrier, I want to help them in any way I can because I have been in their place, and I know how it feels. The biggest lesson that I've learned is that there are a lot of people that need help, and most of them are not able to get the help they need. So it's important that we have people that can help those who struggle. Thank you for listening.