“If we can just get one character in jean shorts, I’d consider today a success,” said Pat Mohr, chatting just before game time with fellow volunteer Jeremy Wilson. Sorry Pat, no such luck. Instead, after much deliberation and passionate argument, the kids settle on a T-shirt-wearing lion to star in their story. Mohr, the storyteller, leads 25 other voices in reciting what they have written so far. It is the first page of a short story entitled “Reggie and the Rhinos,” the tale of a brave lion and his travails as a lifeguard on a rhinos-only beach, brought to you by Mrs. Dunn’s class of second-graders at Washington Irving Elementary School.
The entire class is sitting on a large foam square in front of a projector screen that displays the text of their story. Mohr paces back and forth, facilitating the discussion, asking questions and keeping the story moving. Wilson stands to his right, illustrating selected scenes on a large white sketch pad. At the end of their workshop, every student will write their own end to the story and leave with a bound copy, complete with a personalized picture and a photocopy of their handwritten conclusion.
This morning’s program is part of a weekly set of workshops run by volunteers and staffers at 826CHI, the local branch of a non-profit, national tutoring organization started in San Francisco by novelist Dave Eggers in 2002. Four thousand volunteers, on whom the organization relies for its livelihood, are spread over seven chapters in cities like Seattle, Los Angeles and New York City. They help tutor over 18,000 students between the ages of 6 and 18. “826’s goals and missions have to do with getting students excited about writing and then also supporting teachers in their classroom in their ability to teach writing,” says Mara O’Brien, co-director of 826CHI. “It’s that one-on-one contact and adult interaction that can really improve a child’s writing, both creatively as well as grammatically.”
In 2003, Leah Guenther, a Northwestern Ph.D. candidate, attended a reading at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago given by Eggers, a well-known novelist and the editor of McSweeney’s, a literary magazine. “He spoke about 826 Valencia and mentioned that the model could be replicated in other cities,” Guenther said in an e-mail. “A group of people got together after the event, and we started trying to figure out what steps we might take to make an 826 work in Chicago.”
Meanwhile, O’Brien was teaching at an overcrowded public school in Chicago and looking for something new. “My final year of teaching, I had 33 kids in a fifth-grade classroom, and I just wasn’t accomplishing what I wanted to, and couldn’t,” she said. When Eggers asked her to help found an 826 chapter in October 2005, O’Brien leapt at the opportunity. At the time, O’Brien thought that 826 was “the perfect mix between being able to be innovative … and at the same time [affect] education.” She did research and observation at 826 Valencia in San Francisco and then worked with Guenther to raise money and find a suitable location in Chicago.
After considering several locations, they settled on a storefront in Wicker Park. Amanda Bruscino, the other co-director, said that students and volunteers were the two primary considerations in choosing the area. Over 16,000 students attend 15 public schools located within one mile of 826CHI, she said. “We try to focus on Chicago Public Schools and underserved schools,” she said. CPS, according to Bruscino, classifies 88 percent of students in the area as low-income.
Wicker Park is also filled with many of the people 826 attracts, Bruscino said. “A majority [of our volunteers] are graduate students or recent college graduates who have a flexible schedule,” she says. Eggers’ popularity, especially in literary circles, has also been instrumental in the success of 826CHI. “Most people found out about us through Dave’s books.”
“1331 North Milwaukee,” I tell the cab driver on my way through Wicker Park. When I get out, a decidedly unwelcome sight greets me: The Boring Store. I double-checked the address. No, this is definitely the place. I walked through the front doors and was immediately face-to-face with a grid of about 30 surveillance cameras mounted on a wall.
On the walls, shelves of seemingly innocuous devices stood next to bland cardboard boxes all bearing the same logo – a man in a fedora and trench coat pushing a shopping cart – and a description of each device’s function. There was a USB-powered miniature paper shredder, Suave Shampoo containers with false bottoms, grappling hooks and even disguises; everything a burgeoning James Bond might need to get started. There was a tagline on each box: “The Least Intriguing Store In The Midwest.” I went up to whom I assumed to be the cashier, a pale guy with long black hair and a conspicuously large moustache, and asked for Mara. He directed me to the back room.
The room was spacious with a high ceiling and was painted in broad columns of bright colors that seemed equal parts Dr. Seuss and IKEA. Mara greeted me and explained that the Boring Store is actually the retail space of 826CHI. Every chapter has a themed retail outlet. In San Francisco – the practice began at 826 Valencia because the building it occupied was zoned for commercial use – it’s pirates; in L.A., time travel (tagline: “Whenever you are, we’re already then”); in Chicago, gear for undercover spies. Patrick Shaffner, the aforementioned cashier and 826CHI’s Outreach Coordinator, put it this way: “[The Boring Store] is Chicago’s only secret agent spy-supply store that doesn’t exist. We have quite the deceptive front. I don’t know what’s going into your publication, but I hope you will not compromise our integrity and our identity.”
Shaffner was one of many young, educated volunteers and staffers who seemed to have ended up at 826 in lieu of having concrete plans for the future. When I asked Shaffner what he planned to do next, he gave me a funny and revealing answer: “Well, Mom and Dad, I don’t know … the future is a mystery. I don’t know where my piece fits in this puzzle.” I felt I might be on to something.
While observing the drop-in tutoring, which is free and open to kids after school, I met Libby Walker, who graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism last June and now works as a cocktail waitress. “(After graduation), I was feeling a little uninspired, and I figured that hanging out with little kids and their imaginations would get things going for me,” she says. Walker wants to write children’s books, and she is certainly not unique in her ambition to become a professional writer. Wilson, too, wants to be a writer. A volunteer at 826 since its inception, he demurred when asked about his profession, saying he was taking classes at the University of Chicago and hoped to one day be a college professor.
In this way, there is a large gap between the backgrounds of the students 826 serves, who tend to be low-income and minority, and the people they employ as volunteers. In most communities, these two groups might never meet, which is one of the reasons Shaffner says that 826 is so special. “This is our way of showing [them]: There are these strangers out there who care not only about the future of the country and the world, but also care about these kids in particular,” he said.
It was so easy to be swayed. Twenty-five bright and eager faces, ready to participate and seemingly thrilled by the possibilities of the written word. I found myself envisioning a bright future for kids like Oscar, who corrected the typist by changing “screemed” to “screamed,” and Cecie, who wrote an imaginative and remarkably advanced ending to the story. But the truth is a little less inviting.
Ninety-five percent of the students who attend nearby Irving Elementary School are considered low-income by Chicago Public Schools, according to teacher Heather Dunn, who has taught at Irving for 13 years. The school is about evenly split between black and Latino students, who still consis
tently perform well below the national average in writing assessments. When the results of the National Assessment of Education Progress were released in April, both blacks and Latinos in Chicago improved their scores slightly in relation to their counterparts across the country. But some researchers still find the situation to be pretty bleak.
“There are gaps favoring white students over Hispanic students, and rich students over poor students,” says Larry Hedges, a statistics professor at Northwestern who specializes in studying standardized assessments. “And those gaps seem pretty big, and they don’t seem to be closing very fast.”
Still, Hedges said that the problems in our education system could be fixed if we were willing to devote the resources to their solutions. “I personally believe they’re all reversible,” Hedges says. “Whether society has the will to reverse them is another issue.” And that’s the crux of 826. Who’s going to care? Who’s going to devote their time to improving the lives of disadvantaged students? Who’s going to give something of themselves to those students who might benefit the most? To find the answers, I’d suggest hopping on the Metra, getting off at Clybourn, and making your way to an unassuming little storefront on Milwaukee Avenue. Ask for Mara.
