Day 5

Day Five (March 7, 2011):

Today I was able to work with Riley again. We started out by reading a ten page story. Riley was taking her time and reading her printout while I read the story online.  The teacher was doing her walks around the room and when she arrived at Riley she told her that she could go ahead and do the assessment since she had the story in front of her and did not have to read the entire thing. I realized that this is something you would normally never see happen in a normal classroom setting, but the circumstances are different in this case. Riley is still behind in her literature class. She said that she is pretty much caught up with all of the other classes except for this one because of all the reading.

We worked through the homework that followed the reading. Riley was asked to write a few short essays throughout the homework that involved her interpretation of different parts of the story. I have never had to read any of Riley’s writing or seen it before since all of her tests are taken on the computer and are generally multiple choice. Her grammar skills were actually lacking. I know that students today are said to write like they talk, but I have never really witnessed that until I watched Riley working on her short essays. I helped her with her writing the best that I could as we went along. I noticed that she was using the wrong ‘their’ while she was typing so I wrote out for her the three different forms of the word that people generally get confused.  After we went over the differences she said that it helped and refreshed her memory. There was a few other times when she would use slang words like ‘gonna’ instead of going, but I would point it out to her and she would correct it. We worked through the quiz and she made a 90 on it. We did not get through very much of her work since the story that she had to read was so long. I can understand why it is difficult for Riley to stay up to speed with her work since she is required to do the reading and then the homework and quizzes all in one sitting.

I feel like I am developing a relationship with Riley. She knows that I will be there every Monday at the same time and that she will have me to help her. Sometimes when we are going over questions from her homework or for the quizzes I will ask her to explain why she chose her answer. I think that if she can do that then she really understands the material and what is really going on. If she has trouble or says her common phrase: “I don’t know”, I tell her that I think she really does and try to explain the question differently. Most of the time after I explain something, Riley, is able to make the connection to the material and understand how we arrived at the answer.  

Riley seems to be making progress though. I think that after we go over certain terms she retains the information because she can answer my questions about it. I explain vocabulary terms to her that she does not understand and I see her make the best choices for the quiz questions based off of the explanations that I have given her.

Another thing that I have noticed every time that I drive to the school, I pass a police car. This is not an exaggeration at all. Every single time I have drove over to tutor, I have seen a police car patrolling through the neighborhood. I do not know exactly why I have picked up on this, but it is something that I have noticed happening.