Yesterday was the last day of drop-in tutoring and, as you can tell from the News & Announcements section, we had a marvelous party. And even though I’ll see most of our regular drop-in students this summer in the workshops, I felt a little sad as I left work yesterday and got in my car to drive home.

The last three months have been an incredible experience. I’ve always been a writer and more recently I’ve been thinking of going back to school to earn a masters degree in social work—but kids ... I never imagined working with kids. Furthermore, I never imagined how delightful and hilarious and insightful they are.

Each day at 2:15, I get up from my desk, grab the jug of pretzels, a few paper plates, and join Pilar in the writing lab to greet first, the tutors, and then the students. The tutors file in quietly, nodding hello and arranging themselves in various places around the lab. We chat idly as I put out the pretzels, waiting for the kids – without fail, every afternoon it feels as though we are about to have a party and we’re just waiting for the first guests to arrive. And then, like clockwork, at 2:40 the loud and clumsy sounds of the students clambering their way up the stairwell bursts into the room.

I watch as the tutors all sit up a little straighter, put away whatever magazine or book they were reading, and turn their heads towards the door. Who will they be working with today? Will they find out if the student they worked with last week got an A on that paper? Will they finally finish that chess tournament from two weeks ago? Will they work with a student they’ve never had?

Sometimes we try to match the students up with tutors as they come in but, more often than not, the kids come bursting into the room, crowd around the sign-in sheet and then, seemingly, fling themselves out into various corners of the room. They throw their backpacks on the floor with careless thuds, slap their homework down on the tables, grab pencils with one hand and reach for a fistful of pretzels with the other ... almost before a tutor even has time to say hello. It’s truly astounding to observe.

My other favorite time of the day is 4:00 when I go around the room with the jar of RedVines. Everyone gets two, students and tutors alike. Not only do the kids give me more smiles than any other time of the day, but I get to see what everyone is working on and what kind of progress they’re making. 4 o’clock is the time students are usually transitioning from their homework into a creative project and so I get to peer over Jessica’s shoulder to read her latest poem or stop and watch Roman drawing dragons for a comic book sequence.

For the last few days we’ve had two girls from Broadway Elementary here working on a very special task. They’ve each been invited to apply to a local private school and have been working hard on the essay portion of their applications with two of our tutors. Listening to these girls discuss the required topics of social justice, ecological sanity and diversity with their tutors is really exciting and I can’t help thinking how lucky they are to be able to come here and get such incredible help. These are amazingly difficult topics for a nine-year-old and I just keep wondering how the students who don’t come to 826LA are handling these essays.

I’m really going to miss my regular afternoons this summer, the 2:40 ruckus and the 4 o’clock smiles—but I’m also excited to see these students, when they’re not laden with homework, really bloom in the incredible classes we’ll be offering. Maybe kids are where I should have been heading all along. I can almost imagine that if every kid in this country were getting this kind of help the need for social workers might even dwindle in the first place.