APEX Community Center- SL Blog #1

            I know this blog post is late, but I was under the impression that the first Service Learning Blog was due after our first day at our placement.  Oh well! The thing that attracted me to do the Service Learning aspect of this class was that I never would have thought doing such work would relate to Shakespeare in any way.  When you hear “Shakespeare”, you distance the topic to a time and place far away from modern times, or at least I do.  However, after reading The Comedy of Errors, Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice, it becomes clear that won’t be the case.  I wanted to do my service learning placement with local youth, because I have tutored a lot before and wanted to continue that work.  So I looked at APEX youth center and Boys and Girl Club among others, but ultimately picked APEX.

            I picked APEX because it was in a neighborhood that I have personal experience within Central City, and is a community that is in desperate need for youth leadership.  I am particularly interested in seeing how I relate to kids at the youth center, as I will be dealing with kids as young as eight or nine, but also possible seniors in high school.  I also picked APEX over Boys and Girls Club because it is more of an informal environment and I think that is a better place to listen to kids and hear what they are going through on a day-to-day basis.  I hope to be able to interact with the kids and just get a taste of what their daily life is like.  I have worked in impoverished, violent and desolated communities before, but with Central City being so close to Uptown New Orleans where the university is, I’m curious to see how two drastically different neighborhoods can interact and be so different from one another, yet so close.  I also have a goal of helping resolve at least one confrontation between kids and perhaps aiding a child in getting a C average in his or her class this spring. 

            I think this placement will help me with understanding the more subtle ways Shakespeare explores social issues, especially inequality and violence.  At the time that Shakespeare was writing, he was not aiming to push a social agenda, however, he still was able to bring these issues into his writing.  I’m curios to see how modern issues relate to Shakespeare, but more specifically, what in our modern thought process have allowed these issues to still be so pressing when Shakespeare was writing about such things over 350 years ago?  I think that it will be important not only to see similarities in what Shakespeare has to say about social issues and what I see today, but to see the similar causes to such issues.  Violence is defiantly the issue I am most interested in exploring.  I am curious to see how and why some of these youth in Central City are so confrontational with each other, and if anything in Shakespeare can help me understand those problems better.