placement tender square seven weeks ago i wrapped up a three-week training session to become a volunteer literacy tutor in my community. tutoring is a goal i’ve wanted to undertake for many years now, but i've never had the availability to until now. a big motivating factor for why i've wanted to give back is because my mother’s mom, grace, received literacy support when i was growing up and it benefited her enormously. i was the one who had found out about the tri county literacy network and i passed the information on to my mom when i was twelve or so; i’d heard an ad for their free services while i was on the talking yellow pages getting my horoscope one day. my grandmother was pulled out of school when she was fourteen because her brothers’ education was prioritized and she was expected to help her family domestically. she grew up in italy during wwii and recounts hiding from nazi planes while getting water from nearby wells as a kid. english has always been her second language, and she didn’t possess many skills with reading and writing after she immigrated to canada though she got by, supporting my mom and her siblings as a single parent slinging tables at the ivy rose. grandma had a literacy tutor named joan for many years. joan was a bank teller who worked at our local scotiabank branch and we saw her often. she had short, pixie hair and she always wore glasses and a big smile. joan helped my grandmother improve her vocabulary and grammar, and for the first time in her life, got my grandmother into reading novels—steamy romance ones featuring ripped bodices and rippling chests on the covers. after nearly a two-month wait, washtenaw literacy contacted me today with a placement. i’m going to be tutoring an 89-year-old man named ben. english is second language and he’s looking for help with grammar and vocabulary, though mostly he wants to learn how to use computers better. i am told ben is a dedicated learner who asks lots of questions—he’s had the same tutor for a long time, but that tutor is no longer available. i am so excited to meet ben and to get to know him over our weekly sessions, which i'll post about here. 211006 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I missed this before, but yes, I'm glad things have gotten started. 211016 ... e_o_i Anyway, yes, I enjoyed reading what you wrote in ben's_my_friend, and added some memories from my own volunteer_tutoring. I guess I was thinking about this because Frontier College (the umbrella group running the volunteer coordinating system) emailed me yesterday and asked if I'd like to join their alumni program, and I said Yes But Actually No. Okay, more specifically: "You can put my email on your mailing list but I'm really too busy to do anything this term" (and then I blather on blather for an hour). But anyway! 211016 ... tender_square thank you for sharing what you wrote in "volunteer_tutoring," e_o_i; i really enjoyed reading about your experiences with those sweet kids. i am drawn to this for the teaching aspect as well, though there is the gift of learning intertwined with it, too. ben kept saying to me "you have so much to teach me," and my response to him was, "i have so much to learn from you!" and word about the time commitment, i feel ya—i've been wanting to do this for *years,* i'm grateful to finally be involved. now i'm just waiting for my booster shot so i can volunteer with collecting and distributing books for michigan prisons again. it's a really important cause to me. throwing this in if anyone is interested, two great books by writers in prison i'd recommend are "cherry" by nico walker and "the greybar hotel" by curtis dawkins (he's currently jailed in my state). 211017 what's it to you? who go blather from