Learning through service to others
By Rich Barlow
Boston Globe
Summer's arrival means students have brought home the lunch boxes, pencils, and other mementos of the departed academic year. Emily Schuster has another token, her friendship with 4-year-old Leanne Ambros .
The Asian-American tot, her cherubic face beneath a bowl of black hair, affectionately holds Schuster's hand while she recalls, with a toddler's halting bashfulness, their six months reading together.
"We read `The Mailbox,' " she says. "We read `The Dinosaurs.' "
Besides enjoying books about prehistoric beasts, Leanne was a big fan of Dr. Seuss. Asked if Schuster was the first person to read so many books with her, Leanne gives a shy nod.
They are sitting in the Lilliputian classroom chairs at the Rev. Dr. Michael E. Haynes Early Education Center in Roxbury, where Schuster and dozens of other teens tutored children in a new program teaching Jewish values through service.
TELEM , sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Boston, wrapped its first year last month after placing 325 Jewish teenagers into service working with children, the elderly, the poor, and the disabled.
For 17-year-old Schuster, it was her first prolonged exposure to the concrete and brick of urban Boston from the suburban perch of Newton, where she lives. Her first visits to the Haynes Center in December found her tiny pupil shy, rarely talking at all. Leanne also showed no interest in books, a potentially crippling allergy once she reaches grade school and reading classes.
Gradually, as weekly get-togethers with Schuster melted childhood's reserve, Leanne began insisting that they plow through her favorites every day. "Hop on Pop" and "A Rocket in My Pocket" became the catechism, and Leanne enthusiastically learned it.
"She got so excited that whenever I'd come, she'd find me right away," says Schuster. "She'd be like, `Let's go!' It seemed like we'd known each other forever, but I'd known her for, what, two months?"
TELEM , Hebrew for "moving together" -- the name also the acronym given to a computerized traffic monitoring and ticketing system in Israel -- made a student out of Schuster as well. In addition to its community service, the program gives participating teens two to four hours a month of instruction in Jewish ethics, the root of the service they're performing. From the Talmud to the writings of public education activist Jonathan Kozol , Schuster learned Judaism's teachings about literacy and education.
Kozol, of course, is a secular writer. But TELEM unabashedly stresses both the Jewish values buttressing the service and ``thinking about the systemic injustice" that is the concern of political, secular activism, says Rebecca Sweder Platt , the program's director.
Whatever their motivation, TELEM's tutors are embraced by administrators at the Haynes Center.
"Our kids really look up to them," says Sharon Barlow-Andrade , afternoon coordinator at the school. "We have several times during the day that we read aloud," in and out of the classroom, and the teen mentors do that ``with joy."
Rachel Korman, a TELEM intern who tutored at the Haynes Center two years ago for Teens for Tzedek, an older initiative that now partners with TELEM, believes that appending a Jewish curriculum to the service was an inspired stroke.
"I actually sat in on one of our instructional sessions, and I thought it was a great segue from Jewish Torah, Jewish learning, and Jewish studies to actually going out into your community and being able to participate in the community services," she says.
"I went to Prozdor Hebrew High School " in Newton, one of several feeding institutions for TELEM, "which has classes about social justice. . .But I never really had the opportunity to connect [community service] to what I learned in classes."
Volunteers to the needy know that for every little girl who falls in love with books, there are inevitable cases of disappointment.
Korman's charge at the Haynes Center was a 5-year-old boy who, unknown to her when she began, was hobbled by slight autism and severe hyperactivity (TELEM and its partners try to screen out children with disabilities ).
The slightest distraction snapped his concentration; he might break into a dance or careen in an instant from happiness to withdrawal.
In the end, it was decided that the program was too much for the boy to handle, and Korman, now in college, lost touch with him. Even so, "he was a great little role model," she says. "I think we had a very close bond. . .He was a very bright kid in his own way."
As for Schuster, schedule permitting, she'll be back at Haynes next year, reading to an adorable munchkin with a hankering for Dr. Seuss.
