Day eight: March 26, 2015

9:15-10:40

11 hours and 20 minutes

       Today, I was able to tutor James. Once again, Mrs. Clark had to talk him into having a tutor. She told me before he got there that he is a smart kid but he always has to be pushed to do his work. Whenever he is left to do his work independently, he just plays on the computer and doesn't complete the tasks that he is supposed to so she likes to put him with a tutor whenever she can. She sent us to the media center so we could complete some of his E20/20 work. This time when we were trying to get started, he told me that he didn't remember his log in for his computer. This made me a little skeptical considering they do work on the computer every day. So we went and got Mrs. Clark and she just said, "James, stop and log on to the computer. We are not doing this again today". So I'm guessing that he was trying to just not do school work hoping I wouldn't go and get Mrs. Clark. But right when we got back to the media center, he logged right on and went through all the stuff we could do that day. I just told him to choose from the tasks that were due tomorrow but he said he didn't want to because those ones were hard. Eventually I convinced him to do the tasks that are due tomorrow.
       In this task, there were a lot of reading comprehension tasks. James would somewhat skim through it and guess on the answer. I would always read over his shoulder and the answers were clearly stated in the paragraph but he would still answer wrong meaning that he just wasn't reading or at least wasn't reading as intently as he should have been. After answering about three answers incorrectly, I had him read the paragraph completely and I would talk to him about it so I would know if he read or not. After that, he was beginning to answer the questions correctly. Towards the end of the period, he began to get restless and started answering questions incorrectly so he could get through with the task on time. In the midst of his rush to finish his school work, he went to the bathroom and took about ten minutes so that by the time that he got back to the media center the period was already over.
      This somewhat upset me because I believe that he should value the time he gets to spend with a tutor when all he wanted to do was rush through his work and waste time in the bathroom. It has been pretty hard to form a relationship with James because he barely likes to talk to me and even when he kind of talks to me, its still like pulling teeth. After this session, I went and talked to Mrs. Reed and told her about how is was frustrating for me when James has no motivation and is wasting time and she just told me that James was one of the more difficult students in the school and that I didn't realize how much I was actually helping even if it didn't really feel like I was. So this definitely made me feel better and that I was actually making a difference for the students that I was tutoring.

Day seven: March 25, 2015

9:15-10:40

9 hours and 55 minutes

       Today, James wasn't there. Mrs. Clark told me that today was early release so she wasn't expecting the school to have good attendance and she was definitely right. She only had about 4 studetns in her class. Of the students that she did have in her class, all of them were working diligently and independently so they didn't need tutors so she sent me across the hall to Mrs. Rook's class. Mrs. Rook's class is a math class so I always get nervous when I have to go in there. Math has always been something that I struggle with. In Mrs. Rook's class, there was  a substitute teacher, Mr. Cherry. The students had never had him as a sub but they were definitely taking advantage of having a sub. Many of them were saying that they didn't have any assignments today or that they had already finished everything which is very far fetched considering most of their assignments are given in bulk so they can work as they go but the substitute didn't know this so he let them do as they pleased for the short class period.
      I was tutoring Amanda. She was working on a quiz online about circles and how to measure tangent lines to find the angel. She was pretty confused on how to do it and told me that she did not know the formulas in order to find the measurements. I asked her if she had watched the mini lesson before the quiz because the formulas would probably be on there and she said no and that she didn't want to. Eventually, I convinced her to watch the videos so she could improve her grade. She had already taken the quiz twice and failed it both times. In order to get the final grade, the three grades were averaged. So if she did well on the last one, it would at least bring up her final quiz grade a little bit more. After watching the videos, we knew the formulas so it was much easier to do the problems. Since it was just basic formulas, it was easy for me to help her. She was much more talkative than James is and seemed to enjoy having someone help walk her through the problems.She was actually trying really hard and spending a good amount of time on each problem. I don't if that's because I was sitting behind her watching her or if she always tried this hard but I'm glad that she was taking her time to write the problems down on paper and work them out. Out of all the students in the classroom, she was the only one that was really on task and we ended up finishing her quiz and she made an 80 which definitely helped pull up her quiz average.
      Having a tutor really made a difference for Amanda and it really kept her on task which made me very happy considering most students were having a very difficult time staying on task. She ended up staying with me for the second period of early release because she was behind in Math and they saw that she was responding well to the tutoring. Overall, today was a very good tutoring session and I really enjoyed getting to spend time with Amanda and help her out with her Math quiz and practice probelms.

Day six: March 19, 2015

9:15-10:40

8 hours and 30 minutes

       Today, I got to tutor James. Whenever I ask him why he wasn't in class the week before, he mumbles and brushes me off. Its been very hard to form a bond with him because he seems to have no interest in me or the help that I am attempting to give him. He did arrive late today but we still ended up having a good amount of time for tutoring. Mrs. Clark talked to James and at first he said he did not want a tutor but Mrs. Clark always has a way of convincing him because he really does need the one on one time. Mrs. Clark has us go to the media center to have one on one time so we wouldn't have any distractions from being in the classroom.
       James had an online quiz today. He was being more difficult than normal today. His online quiz was around 40-50 questions over the reading that the students have done in class. This was something that was hard for me to help him with since I had not read the book that the questions were over. When I asked him if the class had read the book;he told me no, which I found odd because its doubtful that a teacher would include questions on a quiz that they hadn't read. After pressing the issue, he told me that yes the class had read it but he didn't read and wasn't paying attention when they were going over it is class. We did the questions that supplied excerpts that we could read for the certain questions and he answered those to the best of his ability. The rest he decided to guess on, which I advised against but he did not agree with me  because the quiz was due at the end of the class period. 
       James ended up getting a 74% on the quiz which he was not happy about but I tried to explain to him the importance of reading the assigned reading because he would most likely be quizzed on it later. He mostly took that to heart and was realizing how his decisions to be lazy were directly affecting his grade. Overall, the tutoring session went well between he and I. He was asking for help more and for clarification when I was explaining a question or answer to him. I wish he could have gotten a better grade on the quiz but I believe he learned a valuable lesson seeing how much the quiz grade affected his overall grade.