So I Have Learned Something in College

For the past several weeks at the school in San Marcos, I have been tutoring two little boys one on one. My first student, Jenri, was having trouble keeping up in class. In his second grade calss, he was not participating like the other students and when called upon, he could not answer. I took him out of class to work with him and decide what he needed to work on specifically and realized very quickly that he did not even know his alphabet. So, first things first, I taught him the alphabet song. I will never forget the smile on his face the first time he listened to Emily and I sing that song (he probably just thought we were wierd). After singing the song a few times solo, he joined in and learned in pretty quickly. He still gets mixed up around G, H, and I and also around L, M, N, O, P, but who didnt get those mixed up when they first learned the alphabet? Teaching him something simple, like the alphabet, was amazing to me. Because of the emergent literacy class I took at Harding last spring, I knew exactly what his little brain was going through to learn that alphabet. So, here is some proof that I have actually been learning while in college. I know some people doubt the capability of college students to retain information, but here is some hard evidence that it does happen. Since teaching him the song, he asks every day if we are going to ¨do homework¨together. We have also been able to work on the sounds of letters (which is way easier in Spanish than in English) and also he has put a few letters together and has begun to read. The one thing that has amazed me in this process of tutoring is that he only needed a little bit of help. With only a few days a week of my help, his abilities have grown immensely and I am so impressed with his intelligence. He just needed a little extra time and needed to take a small step back to be able to reach the rest of the class. He is still a little bit behind the rest of the students in second grade, but I have no doubt that he will be right up there with them in no time at all.

Shanna Crossland