Reading With Grace....

               When I asked Grace and her mother to be interviewed for this blog post, Grace had that “deer caught in the headlights” look on her face.  So I decided to start with an easy one – or one that I thought was easy.  I asked her what she wanted to get out of tutoring initially; it was a bit hard for her to explain. “Better results,” she said.  Grace is homeschooled, so what, exactly, did she want better results ON?

                “On reading,” she said. “I didn’t like to read. I wanted to like reading better. And I want to understand what I read.”

                That raises the question - Why didn’t she like to read?

                “I don’t know, really. I guess I couldn’t understand what I read, so I didn’t like it.” That makes sense.

                Grace started with Lesemann Learning in August of 2012, so this gives her a little over five months of tutoring to judge her results. How’s she feeling about her results so far?

                “Pretty good. Reading’s not my favorite thing to do, but it’s ok. It’s not terrible. “ From “I don’t get it” to “it’s ok” is definitely progress.  

                 So what does Grace read, when she sits down with a book?

                Grace is a girl who prefers the classics, the kind most of us have enjoyed at one point or another. Right now, she’s about to finish E.B. White’s Stuart Little, and she’s already read Charlotte’s Web and Trumpet of the Swans. Which one did she like the best? Trumpet of the Swans, an interesting and lesser known EB White novel.

                So, is this a book where a swan plays Louis Armstrong music, or what?

                Grace smiled. “This trumpeter swan doesn’t have a voice, so he gets a trumpet so he can have one.”    

                Oh. Did I mention that Grace has a flare for short and sweet summations? There is law in her future, for sure.

                To shift gears a bit, I wanted to get a sense of what Grace thinks about how our lessons go on a daily basis; does she find them dull, too repetitive?  Does she have a sense for where we’re going? Every teacher aims for that balance between a rhythm and boring repetition. Have we found that reasonably happy medium? Or am I being tolerated by a well-brought up girl?

                I asked Grace to tell me what she liked and disliked about how we start our lessons – we do a Daily Oral Lesson, which involves her correcting and copying over sentences with grammar and usage errors, and then she does a Word Ladder. These are geared towards teaching vocabulary and parts of speech. Created by reading fluency guru Tim Rasinsky, the puzzle starts with one word, at the bottom of the page, and then the student adds letters, and takes them off, according to clues, step by step, hint by hint, to the top of the ladder, until she arrives at the word at the top of the page. The hints require the student to think about synonyms, parts of speech, opposites, and so forth. A typical beginning question might provide the student with the initial word “hat”, and the first clue might be, “a four letter word that is the opposite of love”, and the answer would be “hate”. The early puzzles are fairly easy and get progressively more difficult.

                “I prefer the Word Ladders,” Grace replied. “I’m pretty good at them now.” She grinned.

                “Yes,” I said. “You are PRETTY GOOD at them now. You used to really struggle through them. Remember what you used to say, when you started doing better on them?”

                “Yeah.  I said they were getting easier. “

                “Uh huh.  And I kind of jumped on you. Do you remember why?”

                “Yep.  It was ‘cause I was getting better at them, not because they were getting easier.”

                I turned towards Nancy, her mother. “Her first comment, that they were getting easier, was a classic girl comment. Girls tend to externalize their successes, and internalize their failures. If they do well on something, it’s because the assignment was easy. If they struggle with something, it’s because they aren’t very smart – not because the task was hard. Boys tend to be just the opposite – this is a generalization, of course – boys tend to say, “I rocked that test because I studied and I’m smart!” and “I failed that test because it was a really hard test”.  Grace is one smart cookie and she got the hang of those Word Ladders and she’s doing really well with them now!”

                After the daily oral lesson and the Word Ladder, which give a structure to our meetings, we discuss her longer term projects. She has learned to write an essay from a detailed outline, created a Power Point about wolves, and researched polar bears. What was her most challenging project thus far?

                “The polar bear project,” she said, without hesitation. “That was hard.”

                What was the most challenging part – using the websites? The book? Writing the outline?

                “Well, I didn’t actually USE the websites,” she said, looking away. “I kind of found all I needed…in…the books.”

                “Ah, “ I said. “Would you have preferred to have chosen something else?”

                “I didn’t choose that. My mother made me.”

                “Wait a minute,” Nancy interjected. “I don’t believe I was involved in this.”

                “I have to speak up for your mom here,” I said. “Think back for a minute. Remember all the books spread out, with the different topics….and you picked polar bears?”

                “Oh. Yeah,” Grace said, with a guilty smile. “I guess I did.”

                “Moving on,” I said. “What was the most fun thing you’ve done?”

                “Charlotte’s Web,” she said, without hesitation.  “I really liked the book, and doing the picture.” 

                I like this girl’s taste; this is really one of my favorite books, being both funny and touching at nearly the same time.

                Grace thought for a moment, and added, “I liked doing the Power Point, too; that’d be fun to do again. Like that one on wolves.”

                “At this point, if you do one, it should really be in addition to some more complex writing,” I said. “But now I have a question for you. There are people out there who think homeschooling is a bad idea. This one person on my Facebook page wrote that homeschooled students are  do not see  people outside of a very small, limited group, all of whom think alike. They are too sealed away from the rest of the world.  Because of this, homeschooled children do not encounter a wide variety of ideas and concepts. How would you respond to that?

                Grace thought for a moment. Nancy regarded her daughter silently.  Grace said, “I think that you can see a lot of different types of people, if you choose to. It can get pretty distracting, though, just going after a lot of different things just for the sake of it. It’s your choice, really; if you want to stay home all the time you won’t meet a lot of different types of people. If you WANT to meet different kinds of people when you’re homeschooled, you can,” Grace shrugged.

                I nodded.  Moving on, I said, “What would you say to the struggling student who really might benefit from tutoring…but really, REALLY doesn’t want to be tutored?” 

                Grace struggled for a moment. “I really don’t know. That’s something…something…I don’t know.”

                Nancy interrupted, “May I say something here? I feel that if tutoring is something that they don’t want, the parents really need to try to get them on the same page.  The parent should give them good reasons, and show them how they (the parents) feel stuck.  They need to take that step, and try to get their kids on the same side, otherwise, if they’re not on the same side… (She shook her head)”

                She continued, “That’s why those objective assessments that you do are very, very helpful, because you can actually see what you need. And if you don’t need help, then fine, just go on. And if you do, then you know what you need. It’s worked out great for us.” 

                I asked Grace if she felt as if she’d met her goals, if she felt that she now understood what she read. And, incidentally, if she liked reading more.

                Grace shrugged. “I think so. I guess so.”

                Nancy interjected, “We were discussing this yesterday – do you remember, Grace? And I pointed out that you’d made two years of progress in five months. So at least, technically, you have reached grade level. You have made that goal. If that’s what you wanted to do, then you’ve done that.”

                Grace nodded in agreement.  “Yeah, I guess so.”  I felt though, that Grace is looking for more than simply reaching grade level. Grace is still looking for that joy in reading that is so far still eluding her.  She’s made tremendous jumps, but she still has a few leaps to go.

                “Do you feel as if writing is easier, now, or not?” I asked her. ”Would you say that’s gotten better, or not?”

                “No, I’d say it’s gotten better,” she said.

                Nancy said, “I have seen Grace come home with a writing assignment from her home schooling cooperative, go right to the computer, and just start off, right away. It’s just not a problem for her. But she does feel as if she’s still working on the revising part –that’s still not easy for her.”

                “You feel as if you have the brainstorming and outlining parts under control, though?” I asked Grace. “You understand those parts of writing?”

Grace nodded. “It’s just the revising – I’m not so good at that yet.”

                “That’ll come with time,” I said. “But if you’ve got the outlining down – and writing FROM an outline – that’s a big step. That’s impressive.”

                Grace grinned a little.

                “Everyone works on the revising part,” her mother added. I nodded.

                So, wrapping this up, I asked if there was anything she or her mother cared to add. As they both reflected, an older son entered the room and somehow the topic of studying Latin came up. I mentioned my daughter was planning on taking it in high school and although I taught Greek and Latin roots to improve students’ vocabulary skills, I considered studying the actual language a waste of time.

                “Now you’ve done it,” said Grace.

                “Uh oh,” I said.

                “Well, this is a hot topic between my friends and me,” Nancy began, taking a breath. 

                And thus began another fascinating conversation.  I was late getting to the gym but I didn’t much care.  We talked about learning grammar, and declensions, the purpose (or lack thereof) of learning a dead language, before or after learning a living one. I left clutching a catalog of classical language instruction materials, but not yet a convert.

                Did I mention I love my work?