Let me start off by saying that I had not previously heard of the TED talks before we viewed the video in class. It has now become an obsession of mine to watch at least a few of these videos daily. Naturally, I was excited to receive this assignment, as I'm sure everyone else was.
I wanted to pick something really good, something that I was going to be really interested in. I'm finding that on the TED website, almost everything looks appetizing to me - the method of delivery is so fascinating and stimulating, it is difficult to be disinterested in any of the videos.
Anyway, I was having a hard time the other day finding a suitable video by simply browsing the tags, so I decided to pay attention to who the speakers were. Then I stumbled across it - a TED talk by Dave Eggers. He is one of my favorite people I've never met; I've been a fan since "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", his poignant memoir from 2000. His talk, as it turns out, is something that greatly interests me also - helping students (underprivileged or otherwise) to get more out of their public school education.
From what I read, Eggers made this speech while receiving his TED award in 2008. If you watch this video (and I really, really hope that you do), you'll see why he was receiving the award. Not only is he a charming public speaker (he nervously stumbles through the talk, which only serves to be terribly endearing), but what he has done for his community and others around the country (and now expanding to other parts of the world) is astounding and inspirational.
I cannot do his talk too much justice, but I will give you the gist here -
Dave Eggers, if you don't know, founded a quarterly literary journal called McSweeney's. They also publish books and different magazines, and Eggers himself has written a few books. Dave explained that he was living in Brooklyn several years ago trying to finish his first book and began to notice that his teacher-friends were struggling with the task of keeping their students on their grade level of reading and writing due to public schools being understaffed. Their main complaint, he said, was that they needed more people, that the students needed more one-on-one attention. He realized at this time that he had a lot of friends who were writers or scholars of some sort interested in the English language - namely writing - who had flexible daily schedules.
Shortly after this, he moved back to San Francisco, where he's from, and rented out a small retail space to run McSweeney's. The building was going to shared with a tutoring center, and him and his staff decided that it would be nice to open up the space and make it all one center - the staff would tutor the children on the side after school hours.
There was a catch, though - since it was being rented as a retail space, McSweeney's had to sell something, had to make some sort of profit to stay in the space - 826 Valencia (which is what the center is now called). As a sort of joke, they made the front of the store a shop with all sorts of pirate memorabilia. Behind the shop area was the room that served as the tutoring center, and behind that was McSweeney's.
Once they finally got children to start coming in (with the help of some of his educator friends who hooked him up with particular teachers and schools who pointed the children in the direction of 826), amazing things began to happen. Dave pointed out that it's proven that if you just give a child 35-40 hours of one-on-one time per year, they will raise one grade level in that particular subject. Most of the children the McSweeney's staff were working with came from homes where English was not primarily spoken, and the kids started flocking to the center every day after school.
This is incredible to me - almost hard to believe. Dave said that the kids were actually excited to get all of their homework done at the center, that they were experiencing the satisfaction of completing something on time or before it needs to be done, a satisfaction I feel we don't really appreciate until we reach adulthood.
Eventually, 826 Valencia gained so much popularity that Dave had over 1400 volunteers that would not only tutor in the center (always one-on-one), but would go into schools during school hours and have writing centers set up there. At one school, Eggers' crew was even given a permanent classroom.
The odd thing is, and the part of the talk I find most fascinating, is that the silly pirate supply shop - the affront for the NPO being run in the back - actually ended up bringing more people in (not only to the shop, which makes enough money monthly to pay the rent and the full-time employee who runs it) to discover the great things these volunteers are doing. If I am recalling correctly, Eggers described it as a 'beautiful accident', and I think it was exactly that. It was so successful, in fact, that people have built models in Los Angeles, Massachusetts, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Austin and Dublin.
At the close of the talk, Dave Eggers recites his TED wish:
"I wish that you - you personally and every creative individual and organization you know - will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of transformative partnerships."
He, along with others, set up an organization to inspire others to continue on with his idea, his incredibly simple idea to help children, to give even one child your undivided attention for even just an hour a week, month, every few months. All I have ever wanted to do with my life is help other people, and now that I am growing into an adult, I realize that my focus is primarily on children and schools (public schools most specifically).
You don't need me to write a persuasive essay on why helping children is important, or how the children are our future, etc. Most of you have children, and hopefully you recognize how important this one-on-one time is.
On the homepage of the website for the organization, Once Upon a School, there is a quote from Dave:
"There's something different and incredibly powerful about engaging directly with real teachers and real kids." I couldn't agree more.
I hope you guys visit this site! onceuponaschool.org
