Letting our emotions take the best of us

Last Friday was the third week I had volunteered at St. Elizabeth’s School. The teenagers and young adults I work with have a variety of disabilities. They are so sweet and all they want to do is learn. I find it sometimes difficult and frustrating to teach the students simple academic material. I have trouble understanding why they can not learn uncomplicated information for their age.
In one reading class I volunteer for, the teacher took me aside and asked me a question. She was helping a little boy named Miles read simple words. Some of the words she had him repeating were sadly, re read, foxes, learn, and jump. He stuttered and hesitated with almost every word. Later on that day she told me that he is supposed to be in eighth grade theoretically but he has a reading level of a first grade. She wanted to know if I had any suggestions to help her come up with a test that could potentially be a modified eighth grade exam. I told her I would need to think about it and I would do the best I could. It is such a large age difference that it is nearly impossible to develop an eighth grade exam for a first grade reading level.
The next class I go to is writing with Ms. Sporuli. I was assigned to help a little girl named Molly because her one on one aid had to leave early. Molly is 90 % blind and has Down syndrome. She is not capable of speech and knows a little bit of sign language. I do not know any sign language, but I tried my best to help her. The activity we were doing on Friday was creating sombreros from paper. Molly was not interested in the activity at all. All she wanted to do was play with her toys. I set up the toys next to the project and told her if she worked on her sombrero for fifteen minutes she could play with her toys for the rest of the period. This worked for a couple of minutes, but eventually she threw the sombrero out of the way and reached for her toys. It was so difficult to try and get her to focus!
My experiences of frustration and letting emotion have the best of me can relate back to Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Cask Amontillado,” and the three poems “My last Duchess” by Robert Browning, “Ode to American English” by Barbara Hamby, and “America” by Tony Hoagland.
I think my volunteer experience ties in with the theme of Edgar Allen Poe “Cast of Amontillado,” by explaining that you should not let your emotions take over your body. The narrator Montresor holds a grudge against a man named Fortunato for an unknown reason. He leads Fortunato down to his wine cellar basement where he ties him up and leaves him to die. Montresor lets his emotions take over and killed a man because of it. I can relate my feelings of frustration to Montresor feelings. Although I think I am able to fix this by being patient and not letting my feelings take over my goal to teach the children something simple.
In Robert Browning poem “My Last Duchess” the character Duke Ferrara is talking to his fiancée’s family about a painting of Duke’s dead wife. He speaks of her imperfection, but the ironic part is that all of her flaws are not flaws at all. He says that her flaw qualities were modesty, compassion, courtesy, and happiness in simple pleasures. The author shows that Duke is unhappy and was not satisfied with his dead wife. He shows a lot of emotion in his words and it relates back to the power of emotion over our bodies.
Barbara Hamby poem, “Ode to American English,” illustrates how she let feelings of nostalgia take over because she wanted to return home to America from Paris. She is very lonely and talks about numerous events and objects she misses in America. For example she says, “With their elegant Oxfordian accents, how could they understand my yearning for hotrod, hotdog, and hot flash vocabulary of the U.S. of A (88)”. The speaker of the poem can relate to me and my volunteering by letting her emotions of being lonely go and take the best of her.
In Tony Hoagland poem “America,” he talks about the different feelings that people have toward our country. Most people are not aware of anything beyond their own surroundings. They tend to lock themselves up in their box and not see what else is around them. This is what I am trying not to do. I am accomplishing my goal by volunteering in Baltimore. The author’s feelings are brought to life by his words in this poem to show his disapproval of Americans attitudes toward the United States.
These four works and my volunteer experience portray that sometimes emotion takes the best of us. We have to be aware of our surroundings and try to control our feelings when they start to get out of hand!