| Working at the Joy House has brought unexpected joy. I began volunteering as a tutor for English courses and enjoyed such varied tasks as helping one student write a poem amid many giggles and outright laughter that made someone come and shut the door. I then spent time substituting and learned the more day-to-day routines of being a classroom “paraprofessional.” I was asked to be a permanent (part-time) member of the team and work two days per week supporting classroom activities.
In the past few months, my role has changed significantly and I have seen the real power of working in this environment. Before then, students would score their own completed workbooks and only seek help when they felt they needed it. This meant they had to self-identify areas of weakness and request help. For whatever complex reasons, they would often just work away and forego help. We scored completed work after the students had passed a test, and identified “scoring violations” – items in their workbooks that they had not marked as wrong and corrected.
However, in the past month, Miss Robin has changed the classroom structure so that rather than students self-scoring, they bring completed work to us and we score it. This has given us great insight into what each student understands, and it enables us to provide “just-in-time” instruction when we feel the student needs a bit more help mastering a concept. The change in methods has been immensely powerful and joyful. It is wonderful to help a student unravel the meaning of a difficult poem and then check our answers collaboratively and celebrate “getting it right/” It is a joy to help a student learn how to link together ideas in an essay or to identify objective case pronouns. It makes me smile every day to participate in turning on that little lightbulb of understanding.
That. After all, is one of the many joys of the Joy House and I thank God he has called me to work here alongside Miss Robin and Mr. Ron. | 
