I hurt my head...

Okay, first two sessions were cake in comparison to the absolute doozey I was hit up with this week. It is ESL week so I was working with…an ESL student. The paper was…a grammar nightmare. I’m not trying to be mean to the student. English is hard. Mainly I felt bad for them. The big problem was I didn’t know where to begin or how to articulate fixing all of the problems. The sentence structure was so...everywhere. And explaining things was a very slow one step at a time process. There were other thoughts happening in the middle of sentences. He would say one thing and then have another idea and then finish his previous thought. I remember trying to explain this and pull the sentence out and try to arrange it. I couldn’t grasp his thesis to the very end. I wanted to help him put his thesis in the beginning, but I just ran out of time and exhausted the student. I spent a long time trying to explain and engage him on the errors of his paper, but getting him to understand his mistakes on his own was just not happening. I read aloud and sometimes I had him read aloud to see if he understood the changes we made. The story summary was about a man who cared for his son while he was sick, but the student was absolutely focused on the fact that there was no mother figure present in the story. I really feel that this was a cultural reaction to the story. He just kept reiterating there was no mom, there were no women, where were the women? I kept him there for an hour; my longest session. And he didn’t tell me he had class! He had class. I did notice in the last couple of minutes he was really looking at his watch, but we were on the last sentence so I just wanted to push through. I didn’t know. I thought he would tell me about something like that.

I feel like I am over thinking my sessions. Why can’t all this just come natural? I have to keep reminding myself to put the paper in front of him and to let the student hold the pen and to ask the questions and to read body language. Come on. How much to this can there be? I know the answer…a lot, enough. Whatever. This session made me so nervous. I’m honestly afraid I put the kid off tutoring. I kept trying to find things he did right but there was really nothing to compliment and I wanted o fix all the mistakes. Really the only thing I covered was sentence structure and a few grammar issues, but it seemed really important. The student had no grasp from what I can tell on the subject. I just remember that by the end of that session I was absolutely exhausted. It was maybe three in the afternoon and all I wanted to do was fall asleep. I didn’t even know a tutoring session could do that to a person. But I suppose there was way more than just a few simple problems. My brain was hurting for two reasons: figuring out how to fix the problem and how to explain this to the student so he would understand.