Dave Eggers

The house is a factory.

People are strange, but more than that, they’re good. They’re good first, then strange.

Status in itself is criminal for those with the means to move, and the means to weave communion between people.

But you know, there’s something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention – they go home, they’re finished. They don’t stall, they don’t do their homework in front of the TV.

And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students.

You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time.

But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren’t going into the ‘Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help’ or something like that. It was 826 Valencia.

You know, it’s been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher.

So this is the space during tutoring hours. It’s very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students’ work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas.

Some of these kids just don’t plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time.

They took my mother’s stomach out six months ago.

Through the small tall bathroom window the December yard is gray and scratchy, the tree calligraphic.

And that’s actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we’re able to work with thousands and thousands more students.

It’s not that our family has no taste, it’s just that our family’s taste is inconsistent.

The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before.