Mostly musings: everyday life, funny stuff, kids, friends, and more.

Very reluctantly I finally agreed to tutor. I have this terrible, terrible habit of agreeing to much more than I can do and then doing a bad job and disappointing the people I admire and respect. The first time I agreed, I bowed out before training telling Rick that I didn’t want to disappoint if I again was signing up for more than I can handle. He was disappointed but reluctantly agreed only to ask me again the next time he saw me. So I signed up to tutor every Friday morning for the rest of the school year in one teacher’s class. I didn’t know what subject I would be tutoring or if I would be tutoring one student or a couple students. It was a third grade class so I figured I could at least flub my way through if it was math tutoring. I so hoped it would be reading. I like teaching reading.

When I arrived, the teacher had forgotten she had signed up to have me tutor. But as quickly as she said that, she jumped up and grabbed the book and a sweet boy she knew needed some 1 on 1 and steered us to a room for the hour. She gave me a MATH book that would prepare the kids for the end of grade tests and told me to focus on the first chapter. Watching her as she breezed through the chapters, I saw scary words like whole numbers and stuff. I’m sure this will come back to me but I was hoping the definitions would be in there so I could look like the teacher and not the student.

Before she introduced me to my student, she told me he really needed help on the basics. She showed my some foreign 3 dimensional cube filled with smaller cubes and told me to help him count the boxes in the cube. I do NOT think in three dimensions so I’ll have to look that up on the Internet as well as the definition of whole numbers. She also gave me this padded pocket of stuff that was about 4 times the size of my wallet. Before she left, I asked her what the padded thing with velcro closure was. She said it was the manipulatives. Knowing the million cube, multi cube, cubes in a cube manipulative would not be in the padded envelope, I tossed that to the side and decided to not even look inside. After all, winging it works well for some people some of the time. I put the book under it, scared that I would not know that either.

The first thing I did was ask him what he’s working on and what he thought he was having trouble with. He said addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I asked him how many digits in addition and subtraction and he said 4 or so. I asked him a couple equations from the times tables and he had started adding 4 + 4 + 4… Matthew had trouble with this last year in the 6th grade and it had really hindered his speed in doing other math. He had this great teacher that suggested we make the times tables grid, have him put a really good circle inside each box and fill in the answer however he knew to get there. Then, ask him the equations and have him follow his fingers to the answer.

She liked this tool because boys often have trouble with disgraphia – the fancy word I learned when she was explaining this to me. The circle task is to put a circle that is round, touches all 4 sides of the box and doesn’t go over. For some reason this was really hard for Matt and it also was for my student. I decided to continue to have him do this thinking that better control over the pencil and what it creates would be good in the long run.

Then I showed him the finger trick for doing the 9 times tables. A neighborhood child taught me this last year and I thought it was really cool. He was having a little trouble counting on his fingers so I put masking tape on his fingers and wrote the number on each finger. So the teacher comes in to check on us and my student has his fingers up in the air with masking tape on them and numbers written all over the place. First she forgot I was coming and now she probably hopes I won’t come back.

Anyway, we made a lot of progress in our first hour and I gave him homework to create a new chart that was neat and to fill in the chart with circles and numbers. He groaned but I reminded him that he had a week to do it.

Oh, during our hour, he told me he was really embarassed that the teacher thinks he needs extra help and sends him out of the classroom in front of all the other kids who now know that he’s “dumb” as he put it. I asked him if he thinks he is dumb. His eyes welled up and he said he didn’t know. I almost started crying but tried to keep my eyes from welling up. I told him I had only been with him for 15 minutes but I could already tell he was really smart. That seemed to quell his sadness at least temporarily.

I put a note on the door to remind myself to go every Friday until the end of the year. The last thing I need is to start this and have him depend on me and do something really stupid like forget to show up.

This is my favorite teacher quote. I aspire to this

“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”