End of Semester

Again? you might ask. Yes, again, I come to the end of a semester of tutoring. This one seems to have gone on longer, despite having a fairly good, i.e. willing, student. One of his quirks has been to yawn constantly, and I do mean those huge almost fall back out of the chair yawns. Each session, he got me feeling tired as the two hours wore on. As we got into our final weeks, he started becoming a clock watcher too. Each time he looked up at the clock, I found myself looking up with him. It tells a lot about him that he would ask..."Do we have 15 more minutes?" when the clock clearly showed 10:15am. Class always started at 9 a.m. and ended at 11 a.m. "No, we have 45 more minutes." and those 45minutes started to loom over me as I too wanted to leave.

I also made the major mistake of thinking our class ended last week, and I happily said good-bye to him, wished him well, and said I hoped I'd never see him back here! In a detention center, no one looks forward to a returning pupil but it happens.

It took me the weekend to realize that I had focused on October 7th with our granddaughter's upcoming move to the Tucson hospital for her bone marrow transplant. I had ended him one week too soon. Sigh.

Bless his heart, he came back on Tuesday with almost no yawns for one hour, but then he was mentally done. We reviewed and I wondered if he had mastered the difference in the -ing, and -ed endings. He seemed to understand the 1-1-1 rule for a lot of words in English. One beat (syllable is not a familiar term to most of these students), one vowel, and one consonant at the end..then double that final consonant. Doing it together he got it. Doing it immediately on his own, not a clue. Then there was -s or -es for the plural. Uh, uh. The only way many of these students can master some of these spelling is to write the words so many times it registers visually. The trouble is when a student then writes it incorrectly, s/he knows it's wrong, and gets very frustrated, very fast when the correct answer doesn't come. There's not a lot of patience with working it out.


Well, Thursday's class has come and gone, and He PASSED!! 101 out of a possible 117. 87 is the grade that is needed for a certificate, so the last thing I did up at the detention center today was fill in a certificate. Maybe it will encourage him to do some more literacy work when he's out. Maybe and maybe not, but we can hope.

My slate is clear for a while.

Worded Wednesday

Doesn't always take much to amuse me, does it... This post is usually Wordless Wednesday but I decided to do words, ergo the post Title. I had quite a chuckle thinking about it...I guess I'll be the one who's happy when she ends up in The Home. (Feel free to wonder about my mental state, but just don't tell me you are.)

Well anyway, some of you may know that I tutor reading at one of our local detention centers. The modern, well run, low-risk inmates one. I had taken the literacy training years ago, and a two day slog THAT was. Ugh. It almost put me off tutoring. In the end, I was told I needed to make a year commitment to my student, with a weekly lesson. That seemed hard to do with the hours I was keeping at work, and fortunately for me, the assigned student never showed up. I figured that was A Sign.

Some time later, the AAUW contact at the detention centers said they needed people to teach Life Skills. Great I thought - I was alive, and was perfectly fluent in such things as checkbook, tax forms, calling utility companies etc so I thought it would be a perfect fit. (I have since learned that perfect fits in jobs etc often turn out to only seem perfect. There's usually at least 1 major flaw that makes you wonder WTF.) The fly in this Life Skills ointment turned out to be the hours. Weekdays from about 9-11 a.m. Hmmm...that didn't quite work with my paid employement and there was the mortgage etc. to consider. Again, no tutoring. The Signs were $$ signs this time.

Fast forward to last year. I am now retired and see that the Literacy training is being held again, it is only 1 day and I think I can get through that without screaming. I take it, it's fun, and they mention that there is a need for tutors at the Detention Centers. Most everyone in our group of ~30 blanches, but I have been up there for other volunteer work, and can see myself tutoring some foolish 20yr old check forger who 'only' did it to help her drug dealing boyfriend. So I go thru another orientation and get a badge. I am becoming very familiar with the volunteer coordinator and we are email pen pals. I finally go up for my first of the twice-weekly 9-11 sessions. There is light!


But where are the women!??!? All the students are men! I'm told most women in jail already know how to read. Oh...silly me. It's the men who started being the class clowns in grade school, ended up in Special Ed, and feel they will be on the short bus for the rest of their life. I am usually looking at repeat offenders, tho not necessarily 'hard' crime, and they range from very early 20s to nearly 70! But they are all volunteering for this tutoring, and receive no 'time off credit' for the 4 hrs a week they attend. About 85% of my students have been interested and interesting, and the occasional slug who is only warming a chair reminds me of how lucky I am to usually have students who are motivated. Except when it's slug time or I have a student who cannot give up the "oh I'm so dumb" habit, the two hours really go by fast. And then once in a while I get a real character who is FUN to teach and seems to have a chance at not finding himself back 'inside' when he's released. However, that's tomorrow's story. See you back here then, ok?