Looking
back and reflecting on my past experiences performing service in high school, many
great memories come to my mind. I can see the smiles, laughter, joy, and thanks
on the faces that I helped. Two of my favorite long-term service projects were
helping at a local children’s center in my town and providing a Christmas
dinner to the Franciscan Sisters at my high school. My father and one of his
good friends started this tradition with the Franciscan Sisters of the
Immaculate Conception at my school ten years ago. I have been participating for
eight years now. During the dinner, we serve the Sisters dinner and listen to
their many stories about traveling the world, educating, and some hardships
from their childhoods. I love listening to their stories because each is
different and each one has lived a life full of adventure, joyful times,
faithful times, and grief-stricken times. Listening to the Sister’s passion for
education made me realize how much education means to me. I began helping out
at the Needham Children’s Center, which is a daycare, pre-school, pre-k, and
afterschool program targeted towards educating the youth in my town. I would
help out in the afternoon, after school. I worked mainly with the preschoolers,
helping them with their early developments. I would sit with the kids and read
to them. I really loved watching the kids grow over the year and see how my
influences helped them grow and learn.
My
service projects relate to Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Jill McDonough’s
“Accident, Mass. Ave.,” Frances E.W. Harper’s “Learning to Read,” and
Peter-Hans Kolvenbach’s “The Service of Faith and Promotion of Justice in
Jesuit Higher Education” because each literary work resembles the ability to
learn from one another and the situations that surround the subjects.
In
Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” the speaker is telling of the long tradition of
the “day we meet to walk the line” (line 13). Walking the line both neighbors
mend the wall, which separates their two properties, by replacing the stones that
have fallen. Over the many years of this tradition the neighbors have learned
how to “make them balance” (line 18). The balance is not only between the
stones in the wall but the balance of the relationship that neighbors share.
These neighbors have learned how to keep a “balanced” relationship, which in
turn results in a positive relationship. “Good Fences make good neighbors”
(Line 45). By learning the ways to keeping the wall balanced the neighbors are
learning to keep their relationship balanced. They have learned this through
each other’s strengths and weaknesses and the experiences they have shared with
one another.
The speaker of Jill McDonough’s poem
“Accident, Mass. Ave.” recalls an accident she was in with another driver on
Mass Ave. in Boston. McDonough states “we both knew, that the thing to do is
get out of the car, slam the door as hard as you fucking can and yell things
like What the fuck were you thinking?”
(lines 10-13). This quote shows how the speaker developed and learned the way
to deal with car accidents in Boston, even if it causes another person to
become upset or hurt. The speaker has learned to deal with car accidents and
react in a certain way from the people around her and the experiences she has
been involved in. Towards the end of the poem McDonough realizes that in her
situation, it is not best to react is such a harsh way. She learned a new form
of communication just by trial and error and by being in a less dramatic
situation.
The
last two works, Kolvenbach’s “The Service of Faith and the promotion of Justice
in American Jesuit Higher Education” and Harper’s “Learning to Read,” fit more
closely together expressing the ability of “educating the ‘whole person’
intellectually and professionally, psychologically, morally, and spiritually”
(Kolvenbach 33). These ideals of the Jesuit’s relate closely to Harper’s
“Learning to Read” because the speaker educates and transforms herself by
“embracing human reality in order to help make the world a more fitting place” (Kolvenbach
35). The speaker is a slave at the time
when education was an escape and granted freedom and independence. The speaker
states “Our masters always tried to hide Book learning from our eyes; Knowledge
did’nt agree with slavery- ‘Twould make us all too wise” (lines 5-8). This
quote shows that the slaves knew the key to freedom was education. They
self-taught themselves, “So I got a pair of glasses, and straight to work I
went, And never stopped till I could read the hymns and Testament,” (lines
37-40) in order to gain Independence from their masters. The speaker learned
how to read, creating new opportunities not only for herself but also for the
people that surround her. In order to gain her independence she embraced her
“human reality” and educated herself as a “whole person.”
Education
is an ability that each person in this world should be granted. Without
education there is no chance of progression through a lifetime. There are so
many ways in which a person can educate themselves, and others. The easiest
form of education is from experience. One must experience the world, their
surroundings, and the people that surround them. Education can come simply from
a story one tells, or through a car accident, and especially from one’s
determination.
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