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.
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