Session 4- Justin's Paxil and Procrastination

I am a fan of new things. And meeting new people isn't too bad, either; but at PLC, not having a student to call your own feels like failure. So, when I walked through the door and didn't see either Kassandra or Curry, I wasn't in the best mood. Kassandra had been simply missing in action for a few days. Curry's story, however, was something Mrs. Green hadn't predicted either. He had apparently put in an application to the Work Corps two months ago and hadn't gone through the trouble of telling anyone. The thing about Work Corp is, there's no G.E.D. necessary. Simply endure a few weeks of vocational training boot camp, then show up and work a job that pays a small piece above minimum wage.

Again, the teacher/savior complex was kicking in full force....I only got to work with him for a DAY. A day. What if all Curry needed was someone to tell him he wasn't too far away from catching up? Or maybe he knew that if he were to tell Mrs. Green about what he was thinking of doing, she would never let him hear the end of it, and he just didn't want to have the spotlight on him in that way. But if he had entirely given up school, why did he let me force him to jump through so many hoops?

This time, I was placed in the quiet sector of the classroom, where the three white students wearing black were typically whispering among themselves. Today, one was missing, and the other two sat with a seat between them. Mrs. Green introduced me to Justin, who sat closest to her desk. As Justin and I shook hands, I noticed that his right arm was coated with red, horizontal lines; he was a cutter. He also had a stooped posture and hair that hung in his eyes. I wouldn't guess he was the sort that would want the attention of a tutor; most students seem to feel that if identified as a good candidate for receiving a tutor, they've been singled out in some negative way. So, I tried to keep the mood light.

I found out he was working on some Gothic Romanticism, and couldn't hold back. “Oh, Poe does some great stuff to his readers. All those ironic ends. It's pretty sick stuff. What do you think?”

Justin lit up “I love dark stuff. Like, it ends and it just feels right. Especially when the crappy people get what's coming to them.”

And then, Justin began to explain to me what his favorite sort of books were. I actively listened, asked some questions, and soon we traced it back to his quizzes on ENGL 2020. When he first pulled up his account, I realized that Justin's course completion was far behind everyone else. His progress was in the early 20%. I asked him if he had been struggling, and he explained that it was not that he had issues answering most of the questions, it was just that he was not easily motivated and that, as Curry had mentioned, these short stories he had to read were not necessarily “short.” I soon found Justin's attention span to be very short. He would sidetrack and ask me questions concerning if I had heard of his favorite bands etc. But I also discovered that he had a fear of failure. He told me that he has panic disorder, and it makes him really work-avoidant at times. Though usually a personal subject, I felt that it was a good time to self-disclose. I, too, have panic disorder, and was able to sympathize with him. I told him that although it may put off anxiety to procrastinate, the moment you are hit with the weight of all the things you haven't done, it's all the worse. So, it's better to do it in small doses.

I would gently remind him “Alright, we've got work to do.” or “Let's talk after we ace this quiz.” And very soon, it seemed to work. He would say “Okay, okay,” give his head a shake, and go on. Something I appreciated about Justin was his honesty when he was faced with something he did not know. He would tell me he had never heard of something and ask me what it was, or would head straight to the internet to look up a tricky word. At one point, I challenged him, and asked him to take a guess at what an allegory was without looking. “Uh, well, I've heard of people making allegations. I don't know if that's linked, but that's like, when the facts are fuzzy on something. So, maybe an allegory is a story you can apply to lots of things. Is that Latin, or something?” And from there, he managed to guess the correct answer from a list of multiple choices. In this way, we created a system of relating things and looking for familiar root words. I encouraged Justin to verbalize his thought process; it seemed to keep him focused.

Justin saw the progress he was making and got excited. The next story we got to, he got restless and just wanted to bolt through it. It was one of my personal favorites, “The City of Omelas.” I promised him that because we were running out of time at this point, I would show him the paragraphs where he could find the answers for his quiz as long as if when we got to the end of the quiz, he would explain to me what the “take-away” was supposed to be. We both kept our ends of the bargain.

An interesting conversation was had when Justin had an issue figuring out what the difference between a theme and moral was. So, I asked him what his favorite movie is. “Fight Club. Definitely Fight Club.”

“Okay, so what is a thing that happens over and over in that movie that sort of sticks with you?”

“Um, well, they don't like establishments that much. So, it's like, man vs. society, right?”

“Yeah! Good one. You could say good vs. evil....Or, uh, evil vs. evil, considering.”

And for our discussion of moral lessons, we deferred to other movies.

The class period flew by, and at the end of it, Mrs. Green gasped when she saw Justin's progress. He had leapt from the 20's into 42%. She told him he should be immensely proud of himself, and she later told me what she had never seen him stay on task for that long at once since she had known him. We were able to relate even his small, side-tracked thoughts into the bigger picture to keep him moving. She also said it was impressive that I was able to link all the distinctly Englishy lessons back to things that already caught his interest. Through Justin and I's discussion, too, I found out that he really wanted to move on to college. He asked me if I would recommend UGA. I told him that I would love to see him there and that I was sure he could get to college if he could only stay focused. Justin thanked me profusely, and I told him that I would be around if ever he wanted to work together again.

Session 3- Curry's "Hood" Meets Checkov

Today when I arrived at the PLC, Mrs. Green waved me over to her desk. We exchanged morning niceties, and then she hit me with the point: “Chelsea, don't be offended if Kassandra doesn't want to work with you today.”

Offended? Try confused. Guilty, even. I felt my knees tremble. I knew that I had pushed her a lot over the past two sessions, but I did so because I knew she could handle it. This was a girl who had a goal for herself, and I thought that maybe I could be of help by showing her how much she could do. So, she's in a school that operates on “performance (just do it and we'll get you out the door).” She wanted to graduate to make her sister proud and be one of the firsts in her family to complete high school. That's ambition enough, but I wanted to see her make the best grades possible so she could be proud of herself, too. But maybe that was none of my business. Maybe I should have given her more space. Had I gone too far? The idea that I may have made “the new kid” uncomfortable made me feel awful.

“Oh,” I managed, “Did she mention something went wrong?”

Mrs. Green leaned toward me in confidence and dropped her voice to a whisper. “She's doing the teenage thing and getting in with her peers, I think. She hasn't been doing much work lately.”

Sure enough, when Kassandra walked in the door, she took a seat between two of her friends. They automatically started cutting up, nudging each other and snickering over some inside joke. Her posture had changed. She slumped back instead of leaning toward her computer, and man, she was avoiding looking at me at all costs. I didn't know what to think; in part, I was happy for her that after a month, she was finally feeling welcome....but I hoped she wouldn't let anything overshadow the reason she was truly at PLC. The very possibility reminded me of my freshman year at college. I had always been studious, always had my eye on the desire to become a damned good teacher, but when new experiences and new friends promised me a rush of adrenaline and a feeling of belonging, I cashed in the rain check I had taken for high school senioritis. I was a burnout, doing my assignments as late as possible, accepting B minuses with a shrug. But when I reached the end of the year, I felt hollow. I wasn't proud of myself, and I desperately wished I could go back and try harder. It's not just that I was disappointed by my mediocre grades, but that I felt like less of a person. I hadn't been engaging in school, so I just felt blank. Uninteresting.

But I shoved away these thoughts. Maybe Kassandra had just realized what I had seen the first time I worked with her—She didn't need a tutor. I told Mrs. Green that I thought it best to offer my help to someone else for the day, and that's how I was paired with Curry. Curry was a man of unidentifiable age. He stood at six foot three or so, a tower in comparison to my five foot six. I remembered him, as well, from the table talk I had observed on my first visit. He had been wearing all black and a gold chain with the word “Hood” hanging from it. Instead of intimidating me, this intrigued me. Curry flaunted a tough guy persona, but for whatever reason, he had come back to school on his own volition. And on my first trip when Mrs. Green had introduced me to the table, I even overheard him say that he would voluntarily work with me. I guess that was a good sign....Unless he was one of those guys that assumed “tutor” meant “answer-giver,” in which case, this was going to be a fun day.

I walked over to Curry and shook his hand. “Hey, how's it going?”

He mumbled an answer. Funny how much less loquacious he was the moment I walked up. As I had done with Kassandra, I avoided automatically talking about work. I asked him how he was doing (“Tired”), what sort of music he was listening to (“Rap and shit”). The two of us wound up going to an otherwise vacant classroom full of computers to get things done. In the minutes it took for the computer to boot up, there was dead silence, accept for the chips he had brought with him from lunch cracking between his teeth.

When ENGL 2020 decided to grace us with its presence, we found out pretty quickly that the day would be reading-intensive. Anton Checkov's story, “The Problem,”--paragraph after paragraph of dense Realism popped up on the screen, causing Curry to grumble “This ain't no short story.” I had to agree. It was a long piece, and Curry was not a fan of reading aloud. I asked him if he'd prefer for the computer to read it to him, but he asked me to do it instead. After each paragraph or two, I would pause and ask him about what was happening in the story. His responses were, at first, vague at best.

“That guy that's talking is pissed at the other guy.”

“Yeah, definitely. Why is he pissed?”

“I dunno. He did something bad or something.”

In that way, I discovered that asking leading questions was more likely to illicit a response. “So, this teenager is outside the door, and his family members are in the library talking about how he stole money from the family. Do you think the boy feels remorseful?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“'Cause he knows they pissed.”

We went in circles in this way for a while, but all of a sudden, it seemed to sink in. “He greedy,” Curry said, “And he only watchin' out for hisself, but they're trying to take care of him anyway.”

I told Curry just how right he was, and then we started talking about the story. We talked about the difference between static and dynamic characters, which led us into he and I talking about if we were static or dynamic people. Out came a full conversation, and by the end of it, the long-short story didn't seem so long. When we got to the questions, I again read the question, then the answers. It seemed to help Curry when I echoed the most important parts of the question after reading it. “Which one is not something helpful in identifying theme? Not helpful.” He would hover his mouse over what he thought the answer was until I nodded.

On occasion, Curry would insist he didn't know the answer to something, but I would grow silent until he at least guessed, and then we would narrow it down from there. At the end of the first quiz, it became apparent he actually wanted to do more than pass. When he saw that he had gotten a question or two wrong, and his brow furrowed in frustration. He clicked to the quiz review to see which ones had gotten him. As I explained the answers were wrong, he made eye contact with me, and would then say something like “Oh, that's confusing. Those two answers' the same.” And on the next quiz when some of those missed questions were posed again, he got them right!

But the biggest moment with Curry happened when we got to an essay quiz. Much like Kassandra, he tried to tell me that completing them was not necessary. “Why you wanna do these? I tellin' you I don't have to.”

“Ummm. Because you can? Just one. Come on. You know this story better than most college kids.”

And though he grumbled, Curry placated me by wading through an essay question. I typed out what he dictated to me. What he had to say may have been simply put, but it was definitely correct. The question asked for Curry to explain the evolution of the boy in “A Problem,” and the way we are ultimately supposed to feel toward him as readers. Curry told me that the boy did not care about people around him, and that he wasn't going to ever change himself for the better; that was apparent in the last sentence of the story when he proclaims “Now I see that I am a criminal. Yes, I am a criminal.”

“I know 'cause I feel that way sometimes,” Curry muttered. His ability to sympathize with the character gave me shivers.

At the end of the session, I told Curry that I thought he was a whole lot smarter than he realized and he just had to have the confidence to speak up. He told me matter-of-factly that Mrs. Green thought that he was stupid, and I said that I knew that couldn't be true or she wouldn't be pushing him to keep working, and she certainly wouldn't waste the time of a tutor with him.

“You should tell her you know I'm smart,” he said, and smiled.

My experience with Curry broke down to the basic ideas of education: All students want to feel heard and respected. They do not want to be talked down to, only met at the place where they stand. And from there, if you keep coaxing them forward, they can do awesome things. Curry could explain to you the central themes and ironic end of “A Problem.” How cool is that? And I don't care if he didn't want to write that essay. We submitted it, and it was the first essay he'd ever done at PLC.

Session 2- Kassandra's Two Types of Ink

On my second trip to PLC, I arrived caffeinated and ready to go. My last session had gone better than I could have hoped. I had established what seemed to be a great working relationship with my student with a few broad questions and some good 'ole fashioned scaffolding. I wondered what sort of things Kassandra would be tested on today. Last time, we had focused on Realism, which was well within my comfort zone. This semester, I am taking a class on American Realism, so I was able to answer any questions she may have had—I felt lucky, having heard stories of tutors being placed entirely outside their element, like the girl who was forced to help with Computer Apps on a system she had never used. We joked about how Realism likes to point out just how much the world “sucks” at times, and from there, we leapt into a conversation about what irony is and why it's so hard to actually define.

This time, I walked through the door and walked over to Kassandra on my own. I pulled up a chair and asked her how her weekend was “Good! I went down to Atlanta, chilled. Planning my eighth tattoo.”

“Your eighth?” I said in disbelief.

“Yeah, I've got 'em everywhere.”

We talked about tattoos for another minute or so, and I came to the realization that for Kassandra, getting new ink was a way not just to decorate herself, but to memorialize things. She had her own way of telling stories.

Then, it was back to business. Of our work that day, the story that stuck out the most was one about a man who loses an important document on the ledge of his apartment building “The Contents of a Dead Man's Pockets.” He, a workaholic, climbs out the window to get it, and the next few minutes are stretched into pages upon pages as the man realizes his potential mortality and makes it back through the window a changed man. This story frustrated Kassandra to no end. She didn't see what the point was in dragging out a few simple events. Most of the prose was compound-complex sentences, too, which would have been confusing for anyone to follow. I explained that this was stream of consciousness, and that if she felt overwhelmed, the author had succeeded.

Something else we found helpful was in making a list of hard-to-remember words. At the end of the session, I asked her a few of them, and Kassandra was able to define most. In first drilling them, we attempted to link new words to things she knew or things she may have heard. “Have you ever heard, like, an accident on the news called a 'catastrophic event'? They're talking about a horrible disaster. You know how I remember this? I had a cat named 'Tastrophe....She died.” In this way, Kassandra found it easier to bring things to recall; and introducing new words as already vaguely familiar to her seemed to put Kassandra at ease. This way, she did not have to continually admit how much of the curriculum was new to her. When a word came up on a quiz we had gone over she'd lean toward the computer. “Oh, that's the one that's strong hatred, right? I remember.”

Today, Kassandra had to tackle a few essay questions, too. Putting what she knew about a story into words was not something that appealed to her. “She doesn't check these, anyway,” she said.

“So, you only want to try if it's for a grade?”

“No....”

“Let's just do one and I'll leave you alone.”

I broke apart one question into several parts. Kassandra passed each part of what she wanted to write by me before she typed it out, again not wanting to be wrong. She'd then look back at what she had written and reword it until it didn't sound “awkward.” We talked about transitional words and making what would be disjointed sentences flow together as a paragraph. In the same way that Kassandra had mentioned multi-clausal sentences confused her, she seemed to have an issue with subject-verb agreement when the sentence got to a certain length. When she made a grammatical error, I would read back that part of what she had written with emphasis. “What should go there?” More times than not, she was able to identify the error. When she finished typing, Kassandra read the entire thing aloud.

“That's solid work, right there. Good job!” I smiled. I have noticed that when Kassandra speaks, it is not always grammatically sound, but I am hoping that is something we will be able to improve with time. I don't care if those essays aren't required. It encouraged Kassandra to truly think about what she was trying to express, and I wish PLC would make them a constant presence in the curriculum. For the PLC student that wants to move on to college or tech school, how are they going to look their first college paper in the face without feeling completely overwhelmed?

Session 1- Kassandra's Kicking Motivation

I have never been much of a morning person, but Mrs. Green's promise had me launching out of bed in the morning to slap my alarm off. I embraced a morning workout, ate a balanced breakfast (“breakfast” usually isn't in my vocabulary), and made sure I looked put together before walking out the door. This Wednesday was about confidence. If I didn't walk into that building feeling sure of my abilities, who was I to force my help on someone who was unsure of theirs?

I walked through the doors ten minutes before the next class started. Mrs. Green waved me over to her desk. “So, I've got a student for you.” She wrote a name on a post-it note and handed it to me. “Kassandra. She needs help with 10^th Grade lit.” It was explained to me that this girl was the new girl I had seen cowering by the door last week. She had sat in on the table talk, too, but had been too timid to contribute to the conversation. Instead, she threw in some well-placed snickers at her classmates' antics and stretched out across a chair. Her clothes were form-fitting, and on her wrist, I saw what looked to be an amateur tattoo of a hibiscus flower. She was only fifteen, but I was sure she had a story, and I was wondering how she and I would hit it off.

When Kassandra walked in the door that day, Mrs. Green allowed her to sit down and get comfortable before she approached her at her computer and introduced me. “Hey, Kassandra? This is Chelsea. She's from UGA and knows her stuff. She's gonna make sure you get caught up, all right?”

Kassandra smiled at the floor instead of me. “All right.”

I took a seat next to Kassandra. We shook hands and smiled, and then I just began talking to her about everyday things. I told her a bit about myself, about what I like to do in my spare time. She asked me if UGA was as awesome as everyone says and I told her that from my experience, it's not too shabby. I asked her about what sort of things that piqued her interest, what her favorite music was. For several minutes it was all laughter and ice breakers. And then I got down to business. “Okay, so you know that as a complete and total English nerd, I have to ask- What are your feelings toward English? Do you like it, or...?”

“I mean, I don't hate it or anything. I read sometimes.” Kassandra went on to tell me that everyone in her house speaks Spanish constantly, and it's only between she and her sister that her vocabulary gets put to the test. She told me more about her sister; she is nineteen and has a son, but the pair was abandoned by the child's father. The sister's only choice was to take low-paying jobs to survive, and she regrets the choices she has made. “She told me that one of us has to finish high school, and because, you know, she never did, it's me.” She cited her sister as her main source of motivation, stating “She'd kick my ass if I gave up.”

And then, we got started. At first, Kassandra asked me to read the passages aloud, and then she volunteered to take turns with me. Every time she reached a word she was uncertain of, she'd pause and give pronunciation her best shot, only with an upward lilt to suggest it was a question. “Close,” or “That's what it looks like, but” I'd say, before correcting her. Sometimes when I could tell she wasn't stringing together what she was reading, I'd wait until the end of the paragraph, then say “So, tell me what those guys are up to.”And in that fashion, we'd piece together the story until she could answer any questions about it. Soon, Kassandra was asking me questions, mostly “What's that word mean?” We wound up laughing about how difficult a certain story was because many of the words were in French. We put our best accents on and read the dialogue with gusto.

What struck me most about Kassandra was how determined she seemed to be to get work done. The moment a story came up that she had yet to read, she'd open up a new window and dive in. I had seen other students the last time I was at PLC head straight toward online summaries or use the “find” tool to pinpoint the answer to specific questions without actually reading the passage. I knew Kassandra must have become aware of this, too but she kept to a stringent, no shortcuts policy. She also didn't turn to me for easy answers. She was perfectly content to talk it out until the answer struck her. Every so often, she would get fed up but just how arduous the material was, and I would just meet her grumbles with ones of my own. “I know they don't make it too riveting, but you're doing good work.” I also told her that it gets better in college, which she'd see for herself.

At the end of the session, she thanked me for helping her out. We had completed a good number of quizzes, and she had made A's or B's on every one. Kassandra was largely self-motivated; and although she seemed to need a hand with some basic ESL comprehension, I knew her drive would make any tutor obsolete in a month or so. “You know what you want and you're going for it,” I said, “That's awesome. I respect that.”

“Yeah, I am. I'm gonna graduate,” she quipped back. Kassandra had a plan, and she took pride in it.