Day one: January 15, 2015

Time: 1st period 9:15-10:40

1 hour and 25 minutes

    Today, I was tutoring in Mrs. Clark's English class. Once I got there, I was assigned to Amber who is 16 years old and would like to eventually become a Nurse. Mrs. Clark asked us to go to another room as to have some one on one time with Amber to help complete the assignment. Once we got into the classroom, Mrs. Clark brought in another student, James, who is 17, so I could help both of them with the same assignment. 

    Today, their assignment was to read a passage from The Outliers by Malcom Gladwell then answer ten questions about the reading and post it into a google doc and share it with Mrs. Clark. Amber read the passage in about thirty minutes and then started to read through the questions. She asked me to clarify the questions for her to help her better understand. She did need a little guidance in finding some of the answers in the passage and overall seemed pretty determined to do the assignment to her best ability.

    James took about twenty minutes just to sign onto the computer and stated that he didn't want to do the assignment because it was a lot of reading. Every time I walked away from his computer to help Amber he would navigate to another page to entertain himself instead of actually doing the reading. I had to be on top of him every ten minute to assure that he was staying on task. He ended up taking almost the entire period to do his reading and then only answered one of the ten questions after I read some of the passages to him. James did not seem the slightest bit motivated and it was very frustrating to have to check up on him multiple times within minutes because he was trying to do everything but the assignment. I do not know if James has a disability with paying attention or if he is just not motivated to do his school work. Reading may be hard for him and that may be why he put it off the entire period because when I actually read the passage to him he seemed to understand it better. In Bright not Broken, it talks about how everyone learns differently and James may be more of an auditory learner versus a visual learner. This is something that I will keep in mind when I go back next week. 

    I would say that today confirmed that not all people can learn like I do. This is the type of assignment that I would thrive in because it was reading comprehension and that is something that comes very easy to me. I now know that I need to be more assertive when it comes to time management because neither Amber nor James completed the assignment after an hour and twenty five minutes. 

    I expected it to be challenging to tutor these students but I did not expect them to just flat out tell me they did not want to do the assignment. It was also hard for me to explain things that were very simple to me but were challenging to them. 

    Overall, today was a good experience because it taught me what I should and should not do while trying to tutor. I've had a taste of the difficulty that I will experience on my journey as a tutor and there are many things that I already know that I can improve on in order to be a better tutor for Amber and James. For example, I may have them take turns reading portions of the reading aloud in order to manage time better and ensure that both of them have read in full and understand what is going on in the passage so they can answer their questions correctly. 

    I'm excited to go next week to see how much better I can do if I apply all that I have learned from this first tutoring session.