Prompt #1 - My First Day of VIPS

Upon pulling up to Mitchell Elementary School* for my first day of service learning, I was overwhelmed with a mixture of nervousness and excitement. Mitchell Elementary is only 2 blocks down from my apartment, so the drive is short. The school is right in the middle a residential neighborhood and next to a park; so it was very pretty looking at the school combined with the fall scenery.
As for the actual school building, Mitchell looked like a school that I wasn't used to seeing. All of the windows on the school were covered with bars, the main entrance to the school was facing in towards the parking lot, and the parking lot was also used as the children's recess area. Whereas, when I went to elementary school, my school was a little bit more spread out and we had recess on the playground in the back of the school, which was on a clearing of land, since I lived in what some people would call the "boon docks".
After I had buzzed in through the front door, I signed in into the front office. The secretaries were very nice and were dressed very casually. I soon noticed that just about all of the teachers at Mitchell Elementary were dressed very casual compared to the other elementary schools that I've been in. A majority of the teachers wore jeans all days of the week and either the school t-shirt or a nice shirt.
As I walked out of the office and made my way up to the 3rd* floor to room 308*, I slowly took everything in. I passed through the 5th grade wing first. There the hallway was filled of a mixture of different sounds such teachers teaching, kids talking, and papers shuffling. The walls were painted with pictures of all types of animals, pictures of children, and various inspirational quotes. As I walked by I glanced inside some of the classrooms, noticing the classrooms were typically filled with what looked like about 25-30 kids. In each classroom there seemed to be at least 2 teachers; 1 teacher, 1 special education teacher, and sometimes a VIPS volunteer.
As I came to the end of the hallway, a Caucasian teacher had pulled a young boy of the African-American descent out of the classroom, a few doors ahead of me. She starting yelling at him, telling the boy that he "couldn't call his classmate a white girl because that wasn't how we spoke to each other." Coming from a rural middle class neighborhood, this was my first time ever in an urban, multicultural elementary school setting so this incident was somewhat of a culture shock to me. It made me start to think that my VIPS experience was definitely going to be an interesting one.
As I passed by the teacher and young boy, I turned the corner and saw the sign for room number 308. Taking a deep breath, I entered the 4th grade language arts classroom that I was going to be joining for the rest of the semester. I walked into a room full of smiling hopeful faces; which eased my nerves a bit Mrs. Kelly*, the classroom teacher, was in the middle of a lesson but she stopped to greet me. She introduced me to the class and had me sit at a side table. She told me that since this was my first time, she was going to let me sit and basically observe, as that is what she had all her first time VIPS volunteers do. So as I sat there, I took in my surroundings. The classroom was a corner classroom and was a little bit bigger than the others I had seen; the ceilings were high and even though the desks were in the middle of the classroom like most rooms, there was enough space on all four sides that there were extra tables all around, which I later found out were used for group work. The side of the front board was covered with the spelling words of the week, the theme of the week, and the children names of who are in the "yellow zone", which was the warning zone.The walls were covered with different motivational posters, bus schedules, and different drawings that the children had given to Mrs. Kelly. Besides Mrs. Kelly, there were 2 more teachers in the classroom, which were special education teachers, who were helping out children.
What I noticed most amongst all the teachers were that they all seemed extremely determined. The special education teachers worked side-by-side the children that they were working with until they understood what they were supposed to be doing or what the teacher was saying. Mrs. Kelly was willing to go over and over again with the children something that they didn't understand or she would explain it in a different way. None of them seemed to move onto something new until they were sure that all the children had a thorough understanding of the subject at hand.
One thing that did I did notice though was that the children seemed to have a lot of little of side conversations. Many didn't make it past a few minutes without talking to the child sitting next to them. This, like most teachers, it what drives them up the wall. Mrs. Kelly made it a point to mention that respect is what she values most in her classroom and she has little patience for speaking out of turn. So the teachers usually responded to this talking out by yelling at the children, which didn't seem to have much impact either.
Overall, aside from the side conversations, most of the students seemed willing and excited to learn. Though some were starting to become less interested and more anxious as the fifty class period wore on, but for the most part, everyone, including the teachers, seemed happy to be there.