Lani DePonte

      I remember first interviewing with Bonnie over the phone when I was 3,000 miles away. I asked her how she got involved with 826LA and she said she’d started out as an intern as well and loved it so much that she just never left. In the past I’d gone into internships with an idea of an expiration date, and Bonnie’s emphatic sentiment didn’t really sway that at the time.

      The first time a kid looked up at me and said “27, is that right?”  and I said, “Do you think it’s right?” and they nodded enthusiastically and wrote down the answer, I got it. Helping a student look up L words and O words and V and E words for an acrostic poem on LOVE, I got it. Helping a student figure out how it is, exactly, that leopards love, I got it. Hearing that favorite question of mine at the end of the day, “Will you be here tomorrow?” I got it.

       I understood why you come to 826LA with a temporary timeline and end up in the realm of indefinitely. Even before the kids got here at the very beginning of January, I remember flipping through “Tight Red Pants, Tight Red Shirt, And A Mohawk” and thinking, these kids are brilliant (and hilarious), and I knew that every spreadsheet and all the Ikea research was worth it. Now my problem is that expiration date and I know that I’ll have to find my way back here after other things, like a silly higher education, get in the way. No matter how hard it is to roll off my air mattress in the mornings, or how exhausted I may be by the end of the day, I keep coming back, 30 minutes of traffic each way, with a stupid smile slapped on my face.

Sam Geer

      My first few weeks at 826 have been exhaustingly invigorating – from day one I’ve found myself both socially and mentally challenged. There’s nothing like a poorly-phrased word problem to remind yourself just how much dust your pre-algebra skills have collected over the years. Another dilemma: how exactly does one maintain “cool dude” status with a given student while simultaneously attempting to wrangle and focus their attention on homework they have little to no interest in doing? At what point does one cease pushing a student to try and allow them to wallow in frustration over concepts misunderstood? Should efforts be redoubled, or should difficult concepts be revisited later? Tough stuff.

      But the gratification is there, in both the instant and gestating varieties.  Crawling along a worksheet over an hour with a boy who has trouble remembering his multiplication tables yielded an astonishing counter-display of memorization, as the same boy taught me step-by-step instructions to create an origami dragon.  Getting a high five from a young girl on her way out because now, thanks to me, she’s got regrouping numbers for double-digit subtraction under lock-and-key. Even the simple refrain of “Thank you, Mr. Sam” is a soul-warmer. Not to mention one peripheral bonus since my tenure at 826 began: nightly sleep has gone from precarious to the like-a-rock/make-a-newborn-jealous caliber.

      Despite the challenges involved, and through attempting to meet them, I always feel great at the end of the day. Even in the midst of dealing with the throes of whiney anti-homework disinterest, I’ve found the 826 kids’ wacky, unbridled imaginations to be a constant source of fuel for living the life positive.