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?
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