Tutoring Time

I have been tutoring an 8 year old girl via an innovative program that my company supports. Every week for the past couple of months, I spend 30 minutes on the phone with my tutee. I am supposed to help her with her reading and by the end of the school year, get her current reading level to a higher one.

It has been challenging in a number of ways. I don’t get to see her face at any point of the session (or in general). Everything is done by an interface that I control and that she sees on her screen. Being on the phone, I can’t always sense where her struggles are. When she’s quiet for a bit, I get it but it’s not an immediate facial expression read.

But aside from those bits it has been a lot of fun. It’s probably the best 30 minutes of every week. We usually read a story – meaning she reads and I correct her where necessary. Then we do some reading comprehension questions. And then, the part my tutee loves the best, the games. The system has incorporated games into it so that after each story you can match rhyming words together, you can do a hang man game, and play tic-tac-toe based on what you’ve read.

I do admit that it’s fun to play these games but my favorite part is going over words where she’s had difficulty. I also enjoy helping her get more vocabulary by giving her more words that rhyme with the ones in the story.

At first I couldn’t tell if I was helping her as all. She struggled so much with pronouncing words. But now that it’s been a couple of months, I see the improvements. She doesn’t have as much difficulty with the past tense, which was an enormous barrier when we first started. When I tell her I won’t talk to her until next week, she asks me to schedule another session on Thursday or Fridays. It’s cute…but I can’t monopolize her time. She does have other stuff she needs to learn.

It makes me miss all the time I spent in the classroom teaching in the past. I do enjoy spending time helping students learn. My husband always says he notices how patient I am with students and how I sparkle with emotions when I talk about this student and my past students. Maybe in the future I will make more time than a half hour to assist others, but for now, this weekly session is a bright spot to which I look forward every week.