Volunteers choose among 5 levels of students, teaching courses that range from covering the alphabet to refiing English skills for job interviews. ESL also offers classes geared towards preparing recent immigrants for the Citizenship Exam on Saturday afternoons. Citizenship tutors drill students for the oral interview in English or teach basic American history and government in Chinese. Volunteers are trained and provided with curriculum books, but still retain full creative flexibility in designing lesson plans to best fit the needs of their students. PEN volunteers teach English as a Second Language, Computer Skills, and GED math and English to adults living in public housing developments in Boston and Cambridge.
Volunteers are certainly welcome to teach more than once a week.
Pen also runs a summer program with the same goals and objectives. Time commitment is about 20 hours a week. We tutor at a Department of Youth Services secure treatment facility in Roslindale that houses incarcerated teenagers. We work with the educational staff at the facility to determine what sort of academic help will best complement a student's curriculum. We tutor at Connelly on Monday and Thursday nights, leaving Harvard at 7pm and returning by 10pm.