For my team's first education project, we were assigned to work as teachers' aides in an inner-city high school. Class began each day with a lesson on the material, after which the students were asked to work independently on practice exercises. I would walk around the room between the rows of desks, helping students with the problems and prodding others awake. Sadly, the kids' struggles with the intricacies of English grammar and the Spanish subjunctive were hardly the only things holding them back. Beyond their classroom troubles lay a school district struggling to pay for quality schools, a school board struggling to deal with standardized testing, and teachers struggling to do their job while packed into temporary trailer classrooms.

The kids we were working with were a perfect illustration of the very powerful reality that hits you early on in your term with AmeriCorps*NCCC: there are so many people out there who need help. Hopefully, though, by graduation day—as you sit in an auditorium packed with your fellow corps members, past site supervisors, families who are now living in houses you built, kids you taught to read—a second reality will have hit you: that you can change the world, albeit in a very tiny way. But that's not the point. The point is that you changed the world in some small way during your ten months in AmeriCorps, and that the girl sitting next to you did, too, and the guy next to her, and the kid behind you, and all around you, all those small advances add up to one great big wave of action—a change washing over this country, people becoming safer, smarter, and healthier because of you. This reality may be the most important thing you take away from your time with AmeriCorps*NCCC.

I was lucky in that I came to this realization much earlier than graduation day through my experience on our education project. From the first day we arrived at the high school, one kid in the classroom in which I was working could never be coaxed into paying attention or even staying awake. Each day, I would get to the desk in the corner of the room where Johnny slept through math, then English, then Spanish, and wake him up and attempt to talk to him a little. When the teacher would see me with him, she would call loudly to me from across the room, "Don't waste your time with that one. He hasn't been awake for a class in years!"

Honestly, I can't say I really blamed her for her attitude. In a school where kids are packed 40 to a trailer and textbooks and school supplies are a luxury, it must be incredibly hard to go to work every day. After only one day, I came home tired, frustrated, and nursing a splitting headache, so I can barely imagine what she must have been feeling. As I watched the teachers at the high school trying so hard to help kids who often seemed as if they simply could not care less, it became easy to see why a teacher would lose her temper or say something unkind.

I guess that's almost the biggest reason that AmeriCorps' presence in schools is so important. Corps members have the energy to help kids like Johnny who would otherwise fall through the cracks without notice. It was much easier for me to be patient and to have faith in Johnny than it was for the teacher, because I had the freedom to focus on him alone and not worry about the 39 other students seated around him.

Johnny and I started small, chatting every day about little things—his job, the weather, his baby daughter, baseball. I began sitting next to him in classes during the day, keeping him awake even if it meant talking quietly to him during the lecture or asking him to write down the notes on the board for me.

After about a week of this, the teacher announced that there would be a Spanish vocabulary test on Friday. It was Wednesday and there were 75 words on the test. I convinced Johnny to copy down the words, but he swore it wouldn't do any good since he wasn't going to study anyway.

The next day, the teacher kindly suggested that I take Johnny to the library to study the vocabulary. We spent an hour and a half going through flashcards one by one, over and over. We made up word association games like, "silla" means chair because you sit in a chair. Silla-sit, get it? We made piles of cards: ones he didn't know, ones he did know, ones that took only one hint. It was a struggle for both of us, but we were a team. It never felt like I was lecturing him or he was letting me down—we were trying to get through the pile together. When the time was up, he knew a bunch of the words, maybe 30 out of 75—not enough to get him a passing grade on the test the next afternoon, but still a major accomplishment. I told him that if he wanted, I would be happy to work with him during lunch the next day.

I never expected to hear from him. I cared a lot about Johnny, but in some ways I could also see why his teachers had given up on him. He very rarely showed even a spark of interest in anything. That's why I was so surprised to see him knocking shyly on the faculty room door the next day at noon. He seemed surprised, too, to see me jump up, drop my lunch back in the cooler, and hurry to the door with my flashcards. Even if all I was giving up to help him out was a squished cheese sandwich, I could tell that it pleased him.

We worked together for the entire lunch period. By the end, he could get through all the cards, 75 words, without a hint. It was amazing. The next period came and he took the test. Then, after he handed it in, he did something even more shocking than actually completing a test: he took out a piece of paper and copied the homework assignment from the board.

On Monday, I handed back the tests. Johnny got 100 percent. Within minutes, the test had been grabbed out of his hands by his classmates, who passed it around yelling, "My boy is smart! Lookit, Johnny's test! Brotha's a balla, that's for sure," and so on, while Johnny just sat quietly, smiling shyly in his usual seat.

Johnny and I worked together for the rest of our stay at the high school. As weeks passed, he got more independent and I no longer sat with him or reminded him to do his homework. We still talked every day, but he began to take a lot more responsibility for himself and his work. On our last day at the school, most of the kids we had worked with hung around to see us off. Johnny was the last one I said goodbye to, finding him right as we were all piling into the van to head home. "Are you going to keep studying and staying awake now that I'm not around to remind you?" I asked him. "For you, I will," he replied.

The moral is this: I really cared about Johnny and showed him that all the time. I let him know that I didn't believe a word other people said about his abilities and showed him that I was willing to do whatever I could to help him. And that meant something to him. Having someone believe in him changed his whole attitude—toward himself, toward school, toward his future. My attention meant more than just something to him—in away, it meant everything.

• Read More Stories of Service