From Guitar Hero to Civic Hero

“Raymond. We’re glad we came today. Its nice to meet you,” pronounces Emma, just a little too loudly. I can hardly believe my eyes, or my ears. Emma, with the most perfect hair in my seventh grade class, so uninterested in school, so gaga over make-up and fashion and boys, meets forty-something Raymond at the Palm Crest Nursing Home. He is stricken with a debilitating muscle malady, and he lives life on a tray. That is the only way to describe the rolling bed apparatus that his emaciated frame and gnarled limbs call home. Others shy away, unable to see the humanity in his misshapen shell, but Emma, usually so removed from the lesson, so intent on her frivolities, gets it. And this is why we are here, why I spent my summer vacation to plan a new service curriculum for my seventh and eighth graders. I wanted my teetering-on-the-brink of adolescence charges to GET IT, so they could understand a little bit more about the real world. Not everyone lives in a mini-mansion on a golf course or drives a Lexus or works out at Five Seasons Fitness Club. And there is more to learning than adverb worksheets and formula writing on standardized tests. The human condition is found in a nursing home or a soup kitchen or a low-income nursery school.