Story #6: Shannon Gottesman
This week, we hear from Shannon Gottesman! Shannon is a former JEP volunteer who participated in the program in 1993 – read on to hear about how her work with the program still means a lot to her, even decades later.
“Almost thirty years ago, Wednesday mornings were my favorite time of the week… That’s when I’d pull up to an elementary school near USC and walk down the long outdoor hallway to a third-grade classroom, where I’d pull out four students for an hour.”
“We’d often go outside in the sun and sit in the grass – I don’t remember exactly what work I helped them with, or their names, but I do remember their sweet faces, two boys and two girls… I also remember the way their enthusiasm was piqued when their teacher approved an idea I proposed for a writing project – an ‘All About Me’ book.”
“Every week, the students spent time writing about themselves: what they saw, what they felt, what they dreamed, what they loved. They relished this new project—I remember the teacher’s shock that a student who formerly had no interest in writing was bringing me paragraphs of prose for the book. At the end of the 10 or so weeks I spent with them, I received permission from the student’s parents to take and develop a photo to put on the cover of the books I bound for each of them.”
“I kept a group photo I had taken of the kids in a box I moved with me from Los Angeles to Boston for Law School, to New York for work, and finally back to Seattle, where I was raised and live now. I went to look for it last year when my own daughter served as a JEP volunteer but somewhere along the moves, the photo was discarded.”
“I wonder sometimes if any of the students kept their books… If they bring out the books to show their own children, to share where their heads and hearts were when they were in third grade in 1993, living in South Los Angeles shortly after the Rodney King Riots. And I think about the young student my daughter was working with last year over Zoom, mired in his second school year online in the wake of another wave of social unrest ignited by continuing police brutality.”