826LA

A conversation with Mac Barnett, Programs Director

(October 2006)

Interview by Adam McKibbin

The end of summer presents the same bad news for kids everywhere:  time to go back to school.  For the handful of kids enrolled in 826LA’s English Language Learner summer camp, it also means putting aside their temporary day jobs as comic book designers and music critics.  Fortunately, 826 will still be waiting for them during the school year, offering free drop-in tutoring for students aged 8-18.  In a city where the numbers in the public school system are overwhelming, 826 is the rare sanctuary where a student can find one-on-one assistance, whether with a tricky poem or with the multiplication table.

Prior to a celebratory last day for the English Language Learner class—featuring monologue performances, competitive Uno, and a dance mix chosen by the students (with a playlist ranging from Jimmy Eat World to Leonard Cohen)—Programs Director Mac Barnett sat down to talk about the secrets to 826’s success, and how it helps encourage optimism about an educational situation that some have written off as hopeless.

The schools where your students are coming from, they usually don’t have any after-school tutoring at all?

Usually.  It varies.  There’s a program Beyond the Bell that’s at a lot of the LAUSD schools, and they have after-school tutoring there.  We really focus on one-on-one attention.  That doesn’t mean we always have a one-to-one ration in drop-in.  But the numbers are small, and we make sure there’s an individual focus on the student’s work and the student’s needs.  That one-on-one attention is so crucial—and so hard to get.  I think that sets us apart from a lot of tutoring centers.

Drop-in is for all subjects.  Although we’re a writing center, drop-in is kind of the beating heart of the program, and weirdly not writing-centric.  We’ll do any subject, although parents tend to come here because they know we work on writing.  A lot of kids want help on their English and writing skills.  When they’re done, we have writing projects for them to engage, we put out books, we have release parties and readings.  It’s pretty fun.

I’d read on your website that there was a reading recently and there was a story about an iPod that was received particularly well.

Yeah, “Angry the Angry iPod.”  That did really well.  That’s Andres, he’s one of our big prolific writers here.  He’s an amazing comic book artist, too, which is great because we have some comic artists who volunteer here, and other people who are just super into comics, so it’s a place where he can come and actually get help with comic writing.  He loves it, and it was just kind of discovered because I was trying to get him to write and couldn’t figure out how to get him going.  I said, “Do you like drawing?  Do you want to draw a comic?”  And he lit up and he produced this amazing comic.  He’s always coming up with new, ridiculous characters with powers. 

It’s crucial that we never condescend here.  It’s fun to do this stuff, but not fun in that way of “Aw, look at the little kids reading!”  We want to give them a real reading, we want to produce books with their writing in it that honors their effort.  When they think they’re going to get published in these books, they work harder to have pieces that are worthy.

I was struck by the seminars where you’re bringing in real, working creative people.  Even when I grew up in Wisconsin, teachers would facilitate the creative side somewhat, but it would always lead to some conclusion like “Wow, you’re creative…you should be an engineer!”

Absolutely.  I mean, look, there are all these jobs out here, and you can be a working writer.  Also, professional writers and creative professionals talk about doing these things a little differently than teachers do; teachers do a great job, but they’re so busy with all their state standards that I think it’s hard for them to design a curriculum that juggles all these demands.  They’re making sure the kids are up to state standards, and they’ve got huge classes—how can they read four drafts apiece for all these kids?  So we’ve sent volunteers into schools so they can assign multi-draft pieces. 

Writers talk about writing in a different way, and I think you need both.  You need the chalkboard stuff, too.  But to actually talk to a writer about writing, there’s something different about it.  Kids get really excited and have ten million questions about what it’s like to work as a journalist.

You did a sportswriting trip where some kids got to go to Staples Center and interview [L.A. Laker] Aaron McKie.

We had some of the greatest sportswriters!  It was all led by Steven Kotler, who’s a journalist; he just wrote a book about surfing, he writes for Variety, but his love has always been sportswriting.  So he set up this whole thing, and it was unbelievable.  The kids had dinner in the Lakers cafeteria, they were in the press box, they went to Phil Jackson’s after-talk.

With the drop-in tutoring, are kids being paired with one tutor who they see week after week?

They do.  There are definitely relationships that are formed.  Our tutors will often come one day a week, and a lot of kids might come four days a week.  Their day-to-day tutor will change, but we try to keep track of what those students need, so we can make sure there’s a guided program for them and we’re not starting on square one every day.

Is there a tutoring shortage?

There are certainly days when we have to say “Anybody who can come in, please do.”  We’re always looking for more tutors.  It’s one of those things where we can never stop getting tutors.  But we manage to get them in every day.  That’s one of the most amazing things about this job for me.  There’s almost this sense of daily panic.  We set up this room and it looks really nice, but every day there’s that little voice:  are kids going to show up?  Are volunteers going to show up?  And every day the people come.  It’s been a really nice surprise for me.  My tendency would be to be a little more cynical.  This job is really good for dispelling cynicism.

What are the qualifications for new tutors?  It doesn’t sound like there are rigid ones.

There aren’t rigid ones.  We put a lot of trust and responsibility in our tutors, and they always pay it off.  A lot of people are tutoring for the first time when they come here.  We have a lot of writers, but you don’t have to be a writer.  We have a lot of former teachers, but you don’t have to be a former teacher.  We have a barber and a rocket scientist in our tutor base.  It’s a weird assortment.  I think you just have to be interested in this project, and you’ll be surprised by what you’ll learn.

There’s no minimum monthly requirement or anything like that.

[826 founder] Dave Eggers said once, half-jokingly maybe, that he founded 826 because he knew so many creative people with time on their hands and good intentions who weren’t really putting those good intentions to use.  It would seem that would certainly apply to L.A., too.

It’s mobilized a completely different group of people.  To an extent, I’m one of those people.  I would never have seen myself to be in any kind of position guiding a non-profit.  I don’t know whether it’s specific to us, but there’s something that hooked people, and there’s something that’s very exciting about this place.  A lot of our volunteers are first-timers; I don’t think we really poach from other volunteer organizations. 

Are you pretty self-sustained?  You don’t have to clear things like the sportswriting camp through the national group?

No, we don’t—national is a great resource, and everything is based on Valencia’s model.  But we’re all independent, financially and programming-wise.

You constantly have tutors in the schools?

Yes.  That’s one of the powerful things that we can do.  Not everybody can come to this center; drop-in is very much a community thing, a Venice-Mar Vista-Inglewood thing.  It’s people from around here who can come here every day after school.  With in-schools, we can help kids from all over Los Angeles.  Our volunteer base is scattered all over the city, too, and we can get them into the classrooms and change what’s feasible for teachers to assign.  There are a lot of things that teachers would like to do, but they’re impractical because of their class size.  We have teachers who are contacting us throughout the school year, and we’re always looking for new schools, too.

It’s interesting that it’s hand-and-hand with the schools, unlike an SAT tutoring center, for instance, that may just come and use the space.

That’s exactly right.  Field trips, too, are fun, because we’ll have kids from all over Los Angeles come to our center.

So you get an optimistic perspective on the city’s school system?

Absolutely.  826 is, by its nature, a very optimistic venture.  It comes out of a continual optimism.  Everything I’ve been involved with here has encouraged optimism.  You always say “Yes” to things at 826, and then figure out how to make it work now that you’ve committed to it.  And it pays off—we’re able to do it.  Optimism does pervade here.

I suppose the instinct, though, is “We need to reach all the kids who need us.”

It’s always that—it’s that on a micro-level, and it’s that on a macro-level, which is why there are 826s sprouting up nationally.  Yeah, let’s get one in every city!  It’s true that you need to check that optimism.  You want to make sure you can handle it, but you also want to get it everywhere, because you know it works.  I’m always looking for ways to get to more kids, get in more schools, even get more kids dropping in.