Project Think Begins

“Remember me, Brian?” It was a Facebook message sitting in my inbox, sent by Timmy. The last time I had seen and talked to him was at the Breakthrough Summer 2010 celebration night, five months ago. Of course I remembered him. I remembered all my students. But what was I to say to him? I left Breakthrough. I ran, and I had gone too far to turn back.

Timmy’s Facebook message went unanswered.



“We’re in the really red building,” the director had told me. And there it was. I stood on the opposite end of it at the street intersection and waited for my signal in the crosswalk. Cars stopped in front of the building, and teenagers with backpacks stepped out. Others walked or rode their bikes from the opposite side of the street. We were all heading to the same place.

The Episcopal Church of St. Joseph stands at the corner of 2nd Street and Rose in downtown Santa Ana. Its exterior is layered with shingles colored a barnyard kind of red, reminiscent of the 1880s when it was built, long before its grassy meadows became cement sidewalks and concrete streets. The church has one tower capped by a steeple from which a white cross casts its shadow over, depending on the time of the day, a post office, a child daycare center, or a Burger King.

The church extends behind itself into a smaller brick building, which was constructed in 1955 to hold more offices and a large classroom. It is here in the basement of this building where the Abraham Teen Center makes its home. Funded by Project Think, the Abraham Teen Center is an after school program that opens its doors to middle school and high school students Monday through Friday, three to six in the evening.

I had never heard of Project Think until now, and I didn’t know how. I was a third year education minor at UCI in my fourth week of winter quarter now, yet word about Project Think never reached me until my Multicultural Education class that I was taking. This class required me to volunteer tutor with Project Think for at least twenty hours.

I followed the stairs outside on the sidewalk into the basement of the Abraham Teen Center. Inside, I walked down the hallway and turned left, ignoring two rooms along my way. At the end of the hall, I found the office, where I met the director, Gloria. She was busy talking to another student so she showed me to some middle school students who were apparently in charge of giving tours to new tutors or anyone who was interested in the place. They were all girls, and they were all very eager to help me out.

“So how old are you Brian?” A girl asked. “Are you single?” Her friends giggled in the background. I could already tell that they probably didn’t get a lot of young, male volunteer tutors. There were only two other male tutors in the middle school room, one who was, without a doubt, a gay drama major, and the other who was a veteran math teacher with shining white hair and a lazy eye.

The Abraham Teen Center has three rooms, including the director’s office, and a hallway that connects them all. The first and most prominent room is the “middle school” room, where, as its name suggests, the middle school students study. It also triples as the supply room, where students and tutors rummage through cabinets filled with basic school supplies, novels, and a mixture of both American and Spanish board games; the computer room, where students have six computers with Internet Connection to, as the tutors hope, do research and type essays; and the game room, where students sit on a fairly sizeable couch tucked away in the corner and play on a Wii.

The high school room, for the high school kids, is no where near as well equipped. It’s got the tables and chairs for tutoring, and if students need some binder paper or a book or some time with the Wii, they just head to the middle school room. From 3 to 3:40, the students arrive, mingle, play video games on the Wii, watch videos on YouTube, or eat the snacks provided by the center, snacks that range from pretzel sticks to bread rolls and pesto dip and miscellaneous pastries left over from special weekend events at the church. From 3:40 to 5:30 is the strictly-but-not-really enforced quiet time. Students catch up or stay on track by finishing their daily homework assignments and studying for tests, or they get ahead by, in the case that they claim they don’t have any homework that day, fill out science or math worksheets printed from the Internet. The last thirty minutes are for clean-up and free time.

In my Project Think application I had asked to work with high school students, so Gloria assigned me to the high school room. In here I answered to Elena, the high school “program leader.” (Only program leaders get paid, and they have to be at the center every day from opening to closing). She called the attention of the high school students, and they looked up from their homework (and some, from the cell phones not-so-discreetly hidden in their laps).

“Attention everyone, we have a new tutor! His name is Brian, and he’s going to be here...”

“Mondays and Wednesdays, and possibly some Fridays.” I said.

“Thank you. Would you like to say something about yourself?”

I smiled and looked out at the students sitting at their desks, which aligned to form a wide U. They were all definitely Latino (and I would later glance at the complete roster and see that one hundred percent of the students at the Abraham Teen Center were in fact, Latino).

“So, like Elena said, my name’s Brian. I’m a third-year-student at UCI, and my major is Literary Journalism. It’s basically fancy journalism. And uh, my dream career is being a high school English teacher, so if you guys have questions about your English homework—”

“Aw what? English?” A student with a backwards New Era fitted cap sat forward in his seat. “So you get shit like grammar?”

Elena jumped in. “Pedro! Language, please. Let Brian finish.”

“A’ight, sorry man, go ahead.”

Pedro. I could already tell he was going to be a fun one. “Well,” I continued, “I was pretty much finished. I’m looking forward to working with you all.”

For the next hour, I sat down with the high school kids and learned their names. They didn’t have a lot of homework they needed help with. They were in their finals week for the first semester of school, so all they really had to do was study. Another volunteer tutor, Martha, who was also an older veteran teacher, helped Pedro with some homework. One girl requested my help with studying for an English final, so I quizzed her on poetry terminology. When there wasn’t much going on in the high school room, Elena sent me over to the middle school room. The two tutors over there didn’t need any help, but I sat around anyway to get to know some of the middle school students. When I got tired of the girls’ persistent questions on my favorite color, my favorite candy, and my favorite Justin Bieber song, I headed back into the high school room, only to walk into a conversation that I didn’t really expect.

“Back in the eighties all us teachers smoked weed all the time.” Martha told a story about weed as the high school students listened intently. “It wasn’t as much of a big deal back then.”

“Daang, lucky.”

I quietly sat down next to Pedro. I wasn’t too sure where my place was in this conversation, but then he turned to me and asked, for everyone to hear, “Do you smoke weed Brian?”

I stuttered. At Breakthrough, this conversation would never happen. Students knew to never ask about it, and if they did, teachers knew to immediately shut them down, telling them, “I will not answer inappropriate questions.” But here was Martha, someone who had clearly been tutoring at the Abraham Teen Center long before I had. Elena was also in the room helping another student in the corner, but she didn’t stop to protest this group discussion on weed.

“Well, uh—”

“Do you drink? You’re in college man.”

“No, I don’t drink.”

“But you smoke.”

“Well—” I didn’t wanna lie. It looked like I didn’t have to. But I still couldn’t admit that I did, not that it was even a regular thing. I often crossed a lot of ethical boundaries in my past teaching jobs, but I had always been good about keeping my mouth shut on the issue of illicit drug usage.

“Yeah, you smoke.”

Yeah, fuck it. I was building rapport with Pedro, who I learned was a sophomore. The two of us discussed marijuana more privately. I told him about the last time I smoked, which was just last week, and how it was the only time out of my five times that I actually got high. Eventually he started asking me about college parties, and I admitted that I hardly ever went to any, but I knew enough about them to answer his questions. When our conversation about partying, alcohol, and weed died down, I instinctively took the opportunity to steer the topic toward something more appropriate.

“So have you guys had any other tutors in the past?” I asked.

“Yeah, we did. A guy named Ryan. He was here for a while. He had a girlfriend and he showed us pictures. She was a hot white girl.”

“Was he a good tutor?”

“He was tight, man, for a white guy. But one day, he just stopped showin’ up. No one knew he was gonna leave. He didn’t say bye or nothin’. He was just here because he had to, I guess, like you, right? Doing this for some class? How long do you have to be here for?”

“About another six weeks. I gotta do twenty hours.”

“And then you gonna leave?”

“Well, uh, hopefully not.” I was sure he didn’t believe me. Our conversation probably reminded him that tutors like me usually didn’t last, so he drifted back to his homework.

I’m going to stay, Pedro. But I didn’t know if I believed myself either.