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School / Work Affiliation: Windham School District

About Me: I am a literacy teacher at a male maximum security prison. We teach reading, math, and language arts to prepare the students for the high school equivalency.

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At 3:21am on December 5, 2012, Jacqueline Thomas said…: HI Matthew, I am currently studying for a postgrad cert in education and I hope to work in prisons and young offenders institutes here in the UK in the area of literacy. How did you get started in correction education?

Regards,

Jax Thomas

At 12:34pm on February 3, 2011, Daniel Bassill said…: Hi Matthew. I lead the Tutor/Mentor Connection, based in Chicago. I started mentoring inner city kids in 1973 when I joined the Montgomery Ward Corporation after three years in the Army. I host a library of information on the www.tutormentorconnection.org web site, including somelinks to adult education resources

I encourage you to browse the ideas I share at a web site I call the Tutor/Mentor Institute. You'll see poverty maps and birth to work pipeline charts. These are intended to get people to think more deeply about the challenges learners face at different stages of their lives, so that solutions are more comprehensive.

Working with incarcerated men and women is one of the most challenging roles I can imagine because these are people with many years of accumulated bad habits that are difficult to break. That means that when they leave jail there are not a wide range of jobs available that can help them back into the mainstream. Thus, the motivation to learn, and to stay in the legal job market, is weak.

My goal is to get more people thinking about this and one group I'm trying to reach is the US Military. Many young solders fall into unemployment and crime after the military. On the other hand, every NCO and officer has mentoring and leadership skills that could be deployed in a wide range of youth mentoring, tutoring and job training programs.

If we can innovate better support systems to help young people go through school the right way on the first try we can prevent some of the later problems.

I hope you'll take a look and join me in some of the team-building I'm doing.