Dropping the SAT:
Should we keep the test or get rid of it?
(3/7/01)

Your Educational Future: Rod Paige is confirmed as the news Sec. of Education (1/24/01)

Scholarship Money:
The Gates Foundation sets up a Billion dollar scholarship fund for minority students. (10/30/99)

Something on your mind? -- write a Buzz...

Evening out the playing field
By Neela, age 16, New Jersey

I've heard of the full moon making people do strange things, but I never thought the summer sun would have the same effect.

Nevertheless, I started doing some weird things this summer. I got up early and turned down invitations to the beach. I even rode in mini-vans.

Why? Because I had said I'd tutor underprivileged students and help them keep up with their peers in other schools.

I had never done much community service. I doubted I had anything to offer the community or that volunteering was really as "personally fulfilling" as everyone claims. And frankly, I was scared. It took all the self-control I had to not run away when I saw the run-down building.

But within 5 minutes, six fourth-graders could pronounce my name - a feat very few adults have managed. Within ten minutes, I knew their favorite television characters, how many siblings they had, and what they preferred in terms of breakfast cereals. Within in the first fifteen minutes, I forgot I was doing community service at all.

At the Count Basie Learning Center, we spent our days going over school topics in a building that had once been a bar. I drilled them on multiplication tables, and they reminded me of what it was like when 144 seemed like an enormous number. I corrected their spelling, and they made me thankful that I attend a school where pencils are not a precious commodity.

And then there was the time I was going up the stairs two at a time, and one of the students admonished, in his best imitation of my voice and postures, "Neela, we walk up stairs one at a time." Few things are as amusing as being lectured by a nine-year-old version of yourself.

When my last day came, one girl solemnly informed me that she was going to glue me to my chair so that I couldn't leave. In a way, I wish she had.

This Student Buzz first appeared on Extra during the fall of 1999.

Click here for past buzzes...