I just got a job with a tutoring company contracted through NCLB to offer supplementary education services to qualifying students. Tutoring is free and any kid who qualifies for free/reduced-price lunches can participate, even kids who have good grades to begin with. It’s a sweet deal.
Today was supposed to be my first day of tutoring. I put emphasis on “supposed to be” because things didn’t quite work out that way. First of all, I was supposed to get my students’ assessment records and contact information, but I only received their names. There were supposed to be two of them, but only one showed up. I brought a variety of young adult novels with me because I was supposed to be tutoring them in English, and I thought that would be a fun way to break the ice. Unfortunately we never got to the books because it would have been pointless.
My student, Yelena*, didn’t speak English at all. I asked her “what grade are you in?” and she said “Monday.” I tried “are you a freshman?” and she said “junior.” And that’s as far as we got because her response to everything else I asked was “No entiendo.” (I had to look this up, because obviously I don’t speak Spanish. It means “I don’t understand.” Now I can officially say I’m a Spanish language learner.)
Fortunately there was a bilingual tutor working with another group of kids, so I took her to his classroom and he invited her to join their discussion. It was a relief for both of us.
The bilingual teacher gave me a look that may have been unpleasant while I was on my way out, which I thought was a little unfair of him. When someone tells you you’re going to be tutoring high school English, you prepare to work on things like reading strategies, rules of grammar, summarization techniques, some vocabulary… skills that will help them when they have to read Beowulf and write an essay about the protagonist’s motivations. But what Yelena needs is tutoring in English as a foreign language. Trying to connect with her today felt like being prepared to teach English in New Jersey and then getting reassigned to teach English in Buenos Aires. Same name; very different curriculum.
I probably could tutor Yelena in basic English if I had a chance to prepare, but she’s way better off with a bilingual tutor in the long run. Needless to say, I will not be showing up to any more tutoring sessions without getting a little more background first.
Tomorrow I have four kids, and I know that at least one of them is friendly and communicates well in English even though it’s not her first language. I’m going to let them pick between “Holes” and “The Graveyard Book.” We will read the first chapter and talk about how the author sets the tone and grabs the reader’s attention. We will consider whether the book prompts us to ask any questions (it does) and we will write them down so that in a few weeks we can answer them (using complete sentences, naturally). Then on Thursday we will work on math… but I’m not even going to think about that yet!
Incidentally, a random kid in the hall told me “your whole outfit is really cool.” I won’t lie: It went to my head a little bit. I didn’t want to sound like an old fogey so I just said “thanks,” but all I could think was “I finally figured out how to look cool… and only 10 years too late to do it in high school!” Being a cool kid wasn’t that cool anyway. I’d much rather be a cool teacher.
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*name changed, of course.
