Another session, another student. Justin was nowhere to be seen, and Kassandra did not feel like working with a tutor today. So, today, I was paired with another student from the quiet sector of the class, Elijah. Elijah looked a lot like Justin, actually, but without the scars. He had the same coke bottle glasses, and also seemed to have a predilection for reading. But instead of books or stories, he was a fan of reading shocker news articles online and evaluating movie trailers on youtube.
I was told that he was a special case this week; Elijah was close to finishing his English program! It had been a long journey for him, and he was ready to get it done. He only had a few days worth of work left, but it was causing him to trip up because the subject was Shakespeare. Old English is hard for anyone to wrap their minds around, so Elijah had been using a “No Fear” copy that offers modern-day translations. I am a fan of Shakespeare, so I was pretty excited, until I realized his Shakespeare standard was being satisfied by a play I had never read, Julius Caesar. This would certainly be interesting. It was the first occasion in which I would be working with a student on something I was relatively unfamiliar with. I mean, I knew the gist, and that proved useful, but I did not know the specifics.
This was an interesting session mostly for the fact that due to my lack of experience with Caesar, I could only help Elijah to think through the questions. He told me he often hated how the questions were worded in ENGL 2020, and that many of them seemed like people were intended to trip over them. I could definitely see what he was saying, but I also saw in Elijah a tendency to never want to be wrong. Even when he had gotten the wrong answer and had figured out that it was wrong, he would still continually try to justify it to either himself or me. I made sure to not just tell Elijah I understood why he chose the answers he did, but also to explain to him why the right answers were so. As we've discussed in my Education classes so far, it is easy for students to fall into a trap of wanting to succeed only to impress others rather than success for the sake of mastery; this made me want to erase any sense of shame Elijah might find in being wrong. I stressed to him that a school setting is the safest place to be wrong, as long as you are open to trying again. It's okay to pursue the right answer and trip a few times along the way! That's how you learn.
But I came to find that Elijah had not read the entirely of Julius Caesar. He said that would be boring, and instead had looked up the movie adaptation of it, which (no surprise there), did not seem to include the script in its entirety. I had to ask Elijah to tell me what he knew about certain characters so he could deduce which answer was most likely on the quizzes. I told him I knew he wanted to get done, but we were probably taking unnecessary time to fill in the blanks because he had not done a thorough reading the first time.
These short cuts were common know-how at PLC. From my experience, it is difficult to convince students that this quick, “utilitarian” approach isn't doing them any justice. It's like one of my professors says: “If you can't talk in specifics about something you've said, you just wind up looking like a a damned fool. You have to remind yourself why you read it in the first place—or, hell, if you actually read it—when you're sitting there trying to talk about 'that one story with that guy in the place.'” I wouldn't want to waste my time doing things at half-capacity, and I doubt Elijah wants to, either. He just has to learn there's another way that he can realistically get things done.
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