Word: damaso
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Every cell in eight-year-old Damaso's body is telling him not to do his homework. School is out. It's a nice day. There's a football game in the park across the street. How can he possibly tear himself away to bother with math and vocabulary...
Jennifer Dore, 20, Damaso's volunteer tutor, has her eye on him. She'll let him have his fun for a few more minutes. But there is no way Damaso will dodge his homework. Dore, a sophomore communications major at Villanova University, which is half an hour and a billion miles away in the wealthy Main Line, travels to inner-city Philadelphia once a week with seven of her classmates. When their van pulls up to the three-story row house that is headquarters for the Norris Square Neighborhood Project, kids storm out to hug the visitors...
...football game has broken up now, and Dore has finally harnessed Damaso, who says he's behind one year "because I flunked." She sits him down in the library at the project house, waits for him to stop fidgeting, and patiently helps him count coins and make sentences out of his vocabulary words. "Look at him," she says, holding her hand up for a smiling Damaso to slap after he solves an arithmetic problem. "The kid is a math genius...