Hello!
So as you might know from my last post, I am currently tutoring a rising 9th grader in English this summer. Now just to give you a little background on the boy before I delve into my thoughts; he has had a good education in the past and he is a jock. So of course my life becomes a stereotypical nerd helps the jock situation especially since I'm Asian. Now I have no problems tutoring him; in fact he's a really smart kid. He has a great memory and is good at picking up on what I'm trying to get across to him. What I think his major problem is, is he is embarrassed about these tutoring sessions, feels he doesn't need them to some extent, and just wants to forget about school and enjoy his summer soccer season. And I can totally relate because I felt very similarly when I was just a little rising freshman in high school seeing my mom come home with very large and what seemed scary books about the SAT. Now while these problems can be very easily overcome, I just don't think he has the motivation to really work hard. Anyways, school wise he is okay at reading comprehension depending on how hard the semantics are and if he is interested in the story and his writing kinda sucks.
Anyways, his mom asked me to pick a book and read it with him so naturally as the good Nerdfighter that I am, I picked The Great Gatsby. I had remembered the book as being a pretty easy read and interesting once you get passed all the character introduction and truly get into the plot of the story. Plus the book has some relatively obvious themes about social classes and love. Finally, I thought Gatsby would be good because it's a short book and if we read about two chapters a week we would be able to finish it before the summer is over. To my surprise (and fear) reading it over again, the sentences were a little more drawn out and contained larger words than I had remembered from when I was a freshman in high school. But he had already purchased the book and I assigned him the first two chapters. Since the start of reading this book we have gone through three chapters because he didn't have time (or forgot) to read the book while he was on a trip to California even though he had about a three hour flight one way. On top of the fact that we are behind what I realize now is a lofty reading schedule, I don't think he is reading the book to comprehend. I don't know about you guys, but sometimes when I'm reading a boring textbook or article, I find myself just moving my eyes across the words without really taking into account what those words put together in sentences actually mean. The reason I believe he's not really reading is because he can't answer my simplest questions about characters even after I point out where in the book the answer is. I mean honestly, if the book explicitly says a character is harsh and mean and disliked then obviously you shouldn't say that character is nice and well-loved. To try and rectify this problem, my mom suggested I write out questions for him to answer about the chapters he's reading so that he knows what to pay attention to. I believe that this is a great idea for him especially because he will probably end up doing something similar while in school.
I realize that this post reads as me complaining about my tutoring troubles, but this experience has made me realize that I was correct all along in not wanting to be a teacher. I'm the kind of person who likes to see results from my actions. I don't have a lot of faith in my abilities to just assume that what I'm doing is actually having an effect when I can't see that they're having an effect. With this boy, I don't really know if I'm helping him improve his reading comprehension and writing skills. He doesn't really seem to understand the book any more from one week to the next and his writing is still kinda bad. On the plus side I finally got him to understand that he needs to read over his essays and actually separate what he's writing into paragraphs. His biggest writing problem from the beginning was run-ons and the number of run-ons in his latest essay dramatically decreased. So he can actually write to some extent; he's just too lazy to take the time and read over what he wrote. I don't want to be harsh and I probably won't say this to his face, but he's not a good enough reader to write the essay and have it be good with minimal grammar issues right off the bat.
If things improve or other extraordinary events happen I'll update in another post.
Bye!
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