Third Blog....Last Week at Camden Job-train: July 7, 2008

I thought this week would be pretty well planned out, especially since I was given a project to accomplish. This is certainly not what happened. I worked mainly with the teacher in the retail part of the program. I helped her to organize her students in many ways. I aided the students in fixing their folders and their Curriculum Vitae. These are both important aspects to the students work, and help them in getting both work experience and hopefully, eventually a job. The CV as they called it in England is the same thing as a Resume to us in America. After this, I helped the teachers, named Andrea and Anna, to get organized with the department. I made many spread sheets on different aspects of what the children needed before they could move on and graduate from the program. I made one spreadsheet on the student’s placements, and one on needed reviews for the teachers; reviews are basically progress reports that the teachers have to make. The students were assigned placements based on their interest and location, many of them went to a retail clothing store, while a few others went to a grocery store that was across the street from where they lived. It was a very exciting thought for the students, and I cannot wait to hear about their experience, and also about how they feel about the work they were given. I also hope that many of these children get the chance to get a valid work placement, or job, after this is over, which seemed likely based on the site visits that I went on.

Another activity that I did last week was when I had a group discussion with some of the students about America and the culture. One of the classes that I sat in on was with an educator named Dave who did classes on personal development. He was excited to have two Americans in the job train center and wanted to have discussions to take advantage of this (another intern joined me last week from West Virginia University). One of my favorite aspects of the internship is interacting with the students. They all have skewed ideas of what the United States is like, so it is interesting to hear their questions and views. Most of the time their ideas are completely off and differ from how things truly are; many of the students watch American television and listen to American music, so they think it is very easy to live in the States. One of the students was talking about an uncle he had who lived in Miami. He told us about his visit to the area and about how his uncle was extremely wealthy, making life so easy for him. The student truly thought that life in the United States was easy for everyone. It was interesting for him to hear that not everything is easy in America and that most people had to work, and work hard for their money so that they could support their family. These discussions are definitely the most beneficial parts of the internship to me, and I think to the students as well; we learn a lot from each other. I hope to have many more discussions like this so that my knowledge can continue to grow from the students.