Megan Toogood, marketing associate for academic publishing for Maverick Outsource Services and Words for Work volunteer, blogs about her experiences of Words for Work
I had two enormous surprises when I volunteered on the Words For Work programme. The first was how charming the young people were. The second was how much I fun I had.
Of course, the class weren’t charming immediately, what we encountered as volunteers was every cliché that television heaps on teenagers. Eyes to the floor they shuffled in and those that didn’t flounce straight out again took seats as far away from us as possible, nudging each other, smirking, sighing, wriggling, texting.
In the first full session we set up ‘speed dating’ style interviews where the students paired up and asked us about our jobs and work. By the end of the session we’d won over 90% of the room. They’d given into the idea that we might at least be more entertaining than normal school.
As the weeks and the activities progressed the volunteers, the students and the teacher all had moments of difficulty, but we moved forwards, battling bravely through the sessions with the students learning to trust us and revealing what t interesting, committed, ambitious people they are. Some with vague ideas about the future ‘I want to work with animals’ some specific ‘I’m going to be a mechanic’ some with no idea that their hobbies can be turned into high paying careers, ‘I can take a computer apart and put it back together again.’
Some of the students remained as grudgingly aloof as they could, some were happy to share a joke with us, others made us their pets, ‘Miss, you’re awesome’. Along the way it was fantastic to hear comments from the teacher such as ‘I’ve never seen you write so much in a lesson before.’
In the last session they were asked to stand individually in front of the class and present a PowerPoint presentation they’d made titled All About Me. Enthusiasm for this activity ranged from refusal to, well, absolute refusal. We gave ground, ‘present just one slide’ we cajoled, ‘I’ll stand at the front with you,’ and so we got the first one through it, and then the second, and then those who’d promised us one slide somehow managed to talk their way through four, and a couple of the refuse-niks stood up, refusing to be outdone by their classmates. The sense of achievement in the room was palpable.
To finish the sessions we said goodbye, each of the students saying something about what they’d learned, and beneath the stammered ‘yeah, like, thanks for helping us with our cv’s and stuff’ there was real regret, on all sides, that the program was coming to an end.
