GX Week Two (part one)

Monday 30th March

Olga and I started our volunteer placement at Catch 22 today. A load of people were off sick so they were mostly too busy reorganising things to give us much to do. We sat in on an induction for a group of young people referred to the entry to employment service (e2e), which is ther service that we will be primarily working with. I almost felt guilty about my level of education and the relative ease with which I obtained it when sitting in a room with five young people with little more than five GCSEs between them. We then sat around for a bit, looked through some of the learners e2e folders to get a better idea of the work they are doing, sat around a bit more, made a powerpoint presentation to explain GX to the learners, sat around again, then went home early. I hope there will be more to tomorrow. However if there isn't, there is one thing that maybe we could use our intiative and do. At the induction before the trainer came in all the girls were saying that they had just been referred from connexions and didn't really have a clue what e2e was. Obviously we would have to check what they do send out but I thought that an a$ factsheet about what e2e offers and how it works might be useful. We might meet some barriers with Catch 22 being a national charity. I don't know how standardised they like to be.

Tuesday 31st March

I'm angry and upset today for several reasons that I won't write about. It didn't help that I managed to accidently delete all the music from my MP3 player so I can't even listen to angry men with drums and guitars to make myself feel better. On a positive note my placement was more exciting today. We monitored the inital assessments of the new learners who had attended the induction the day before, where I tried to stop them talking to each other too much. We did lots of photocoping, gave a short presentation about Global Xchange which didn't seem to bore or confuse the learners too much and some seemed quite interested in the programme although they wanted to choose where they could go. We sat in on the learners employment skills session, where it took pretty much all day to sort out about 5 pieces of paperwork in their folders and did some one-2-one work with some of the learners who needed extra help which was the most rewarding. Although both being dyslexic we had some problems spelling it for the SWOT analysis we were doing.

Wednesday 1st April

I'm drinking green tea. I could wierdly get to like this stuff. Today at our placement we did a little more photocoping and sat in on the lessons all day, doing a little one-2-one work. The class spent the afternoon watching the film 'Crash' which compared to scrubing toilets at some of the other placements is a pretty sweet deal. I'm enjoying the placement, even if we are not doing that much I'm certainly learning alot. Today one of the learners asked me to help with their level 2 numeracy paper and I couldn't for the life of me remember how to do long multiplication. I really need to bruch up on my GSCE maths!

Thursday 2nd April

Today the inevitable happened and I got hit by one of the many pens that regularly go flying across the room I learnt now my name is written in Russian and I got lost walking home so that a half an hour walk took one hour!