Service Learning

      When I first heard about service learning I was a bit anxious. And when I finally chose where I wanted to do service learning, Milwaukee College Prep, I became even more so. To be completely honest, I hadn't ever been in an environment where, from what I have seen, there are 100% African American students. I grew up in many different places but for the most part they where mostly white. And the idea that I would finally able to be involved in an environment where whites were in the minority was pretty exciting. After initially meeting the students, and after they realized that I wasn't Mr. Reed's (the white gym teacher) son, i noticed that they weren't any different from kids that i had gone to elementary school with. Initially it was a hard to get used to dialect the students use, which the teachers try to stamp out, but soon it became interesting to me. And these past few weeks that I have been service learning, I've seen that these kids are exactly the same as I was when I was their age.
     Milwaukee College Prep is a charter school in the heart of  Milwaukee. It's located in a part of town that Marquette University told us not to venture into. But this school is a beacon of hope in one of the worst public school systems in the nation. The kids that I have talked to, 4th and 5th graders, all know what college they want to attend and what they are going to have to do to get there. Another interesting feature of the school is that the uniforms the children wear are based upon their grades. The A students, who get special privileges, wear black polos, the average students wear read polos, and the students who misbehave and are in danger of being suspended wear large buttons on their red polos. This shocked me at first, that the school would basically require the students to tell others their grades. But after awhile I grew to like that idea; if this would have happened to me it would probably have caused me to work harder in order to get to wear that black polo.