Life is overwhelming in general for me as it is for most people. I am a mother and wife and I work part time and help out at my daughters' school all the time. I feel like every day I am going 60 miles an hour and sometimes I forget to slow down and enjoy something that I am doing. When I am tutoring D, I am forced to slow down and revel in the process of learning and teaching. I leave our sessions actually breathing slower and feeling more calm. We read a story together and talk about it and I help her learn new words and understand them and while we only get through one story in an hour, it feels like longer because we take our time. While I know I am helping to teach her something new each week, she is inadvertently teaching me about patience.
D never comes to class prepared. I have been asking her to buy a cheap spiral bound notebook and maybe a little journal and some pencils since the first week we started. She has never brought them. I never say anything negative about it, I just keep reminding her to bring them. She also does not do homework most days, but I still try and give her at least one small assignment to do each week.
D is still a child in many ways, she lives at home still, relies on her family for most things like transportation and she actually whines sometimes to me about how hard the reading and writing is for her. I finally brought her a small examination booklet to use as a journal, just to get her writing. I asked her what she might be interested in writing about, she shrugged her shoulders. I asked her what her favorite t.v. shows were. She started naming some shows that my 10 year old daughter watches. She said "I am still a big kid." I smiled and said, we all have a kid in us.
I tell her all the time, "you CAN read, and you are very capable of learning to read more, you just need to practice, and they only way to practice reading, is to READ." She usually looks at me and smiles and says, "yeah I know."
So how do you motivate a student who has never been motivated to learn to read or write fluently. They teach us all about goal setting in tutor training, using the SMART goal system. But she has only one goal in mind, to pass her online masseuse course and get a job. It is not going to happen that way. The goals need to be broken down into smaller pieces. This is something I am determined to work on with her next week. Otherwise she will never be motivated to do the work in between now and her ultimate goal.
Some new things I have learned: 1. She really enjoys reading magazines. We tried with some People magazines for a couple of weeks, because she told me she is really into gossip and entertainment news. But she stumbled over so many of the words that I knew it was too advanced. So I thought about some kids magazines. I pulled a National Geographic for kids and a Girl's Life magazine out and let her choose. She picked the Girl's Life magazine and did much better with the reading. She really enjoys reading human interest stories and I noticed that once she got into the story she was reading much more fluently, and sounding out words without me having to remind her. She would stop after each paragraph and ask me questions about the story and I would smile and say, "let's keep reading and find out."
2. Also as you can see in the picture above I have her use a pencil point to keep track of the words while she is reading, and it has helped so much with helping her keep track of where she is and to focus on really reading each word. When she gets to a word that she doesn't immediately recognize she often tries to guess at it, but I make her sound it out. I use my thumb and finger to cover parts of the word to help her break it down.
I will continue to push her, though I have learned it can not be too much. I will continue to push myself and keep learning new things and new ways to help her learn. Next week we will be working on some short term goals, and I am going to try reading a play with her, I think the back and forth of the dialogue will be an interesting change.
The business of tutoring continues everywhere, everyday, and I am really enjoying being a part of the process. I am reminded each week that patience and caring can go so far. Until next week...
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