All of the students I had worked with previously had been vocal in some sense. They all seemed like they had something to say or something they wanted to be passively known about themselves. Even Curry, who was pretty quiet, expressed that he wanted to be seen in a certain light. But this time, I was again jumping around. I changed rooms for the first time, as well, and was met with new walls filled with new inspirational posters and bits of student work hanging on the wall. My favorite was a poster of Muhammad Ali which refused to be ignored, hanging above the computer that I would call home for the next two sessions.
The girl I was paired with was named Alana. Alana seemed to be in both personality and and appearance, short, sweet, and to the point. Much like I had in high school, she wore a roomy hoodie and a hat slouched back over her hair. She was African American and spoke in a crisp whisper. She was also very polite and would laugh nervously at points when the going got tough. But another thing that I picked up on about Alana is that she would often recede into a state of Academic paralysis. We would read a question and the answers, and then she'd just sit there, staring at the screen, humming thoughtfully but not wanting to say anything else until provoked.
“Which one are you thinking about?” I'd say.
“Ummmm, I don't know, really. I don't think it's D.” She would then float her mouse over A through C.
I told her that she should have the confidence to know when she was right, and that often times, it was her first instinct that she should've gone with. But something to be said for Alana is that she is extraordinarily studious. She listens to the lectures hosted by ENGL 2020, boring though she says they are, and she diligently takes notes on what they have to say. That's why when we got to the lessons and she acted as if she didn't know the answers, I had to call her on her timidness. “I think you know what the answer is,” I'd say, and laugh. And she'd laugh, too, and ultimately click on an answer. Alana was religious about keeping her grade up as high as possible, and she certainly was succeeding. Although progress was slow, she had a B+. I promised her that her average would not go down if we upped our pace.
When working with Alana, it occurred to me that I truly know very little about the backgrounds of any of the students I've worked with. That is not to say that I am not curious about where they've come from, but rather that the opportunity never came up for me to ask in a way that didn't seem like I was prying. Kassandra and I had gotten the closest to that—I had told her about my sister, too—but as for everyone else, I only knew how they were doing in school, and as much as we talk about how a students' external environment affects the way they feel toward school, I wanted to see what progress I could make in truly getting to know who I was working with. As for Alana, she mentioned that outside school, she usually stays home and reads. She likes fiction of any sort, really, but liked the shorter books because they are easier to get through.
It never gets more in-depth than that, and perhaps it shouldn't. Only visiting the school once a week for a semester doesn't necessarily entitle me to know the behind-the-scenes details of students' lives. The books my group decided to choose for the semester preached the importance of knowing the very things I couldn't know. We read Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys and White Teachers, Diverse Classrooms,both of which had to do with reaching out and adapting to your students as opposed to waiting for them to catch up with you. As part of that, you had to be respectful of where they'd come from...acquaint yourself with other cultures, so to speak. And when you are as flatly Caucasian as I am, that is a welcome experience! But if the student does not offer up that sort of information voluntarily, trying to unveil those personal details may cause undue stress to the student. Still, it makes me feel good that I am in a position to experience first-hand what teaching in a classroom so different from any I had been a student in myself was like. White Teachers, Diverse Classrooms stressed the point that performing service learning in a range of educational spaces should be required for student-teachers, and I'm on my way.
But back to Alana. I may not know her too well as a person, but she and I definitely had what we've discussed in class as the Flow experience. We climbed to such a good pace while working that when the time came for me to leave the first time, it hardly felt like we had been going for as long as we truly had. She was the first student I had met who preferred to read to herself, except for when it came to poetry. She preferred for me to read poems aloud because the alliterative phrasing and often old English accents was a little confusing to her. We would often stop and dissect the stanzas to make sure she knew what was going on in the poem. I worked with her on my next visit, as well, but our time was cut short because she was called away to attend an advisement session to talk about keeping her on track for a timely graduation. Our that second session, our exploration of poetry continued. Alana had to figure out the differences between Odes, Ballads, Lyrical Poetry, and Narrative. Repetition helped her as did finding examples of each poem so she could get a sense of what it “sounded” like.
Working with someone for two times in a row has been very nice. You are able to put aside the “getting to know you” portion of the class period and jump on in. Maybe I'll see Alana next week, too.
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