Katherine-TS#2

I met with my Hispanic student for the second time on Tuesday and we started in on "actual tutoring." We read a short story called "A Temporary Matter" which is a critically acclaimed piece written by Jhumpa Lahiri. It was among my favorite short stories that I studied as an undergraduate so when my tutee couldn't decide what he wanted to read, he went with my suggestion. It was slow going and he became discouraged quickly. It wasn't from the difficulty level, but rather it stemmed from the fact that he simply hates reading (and also writing which happen to be his weaknesses that he wishes to improve). As he joked with me, reading makes him "want to fall asleep." Sure enough, the further we went along in the story, the more he began to yawn and joke around. It took a lot of patience on both our parts to keep him focused on the story: comprehending it, pronouncing words as written, and tackling unknown words. Between each "pause" in the piece, I would ask him comprehension questions  and for his opinion to make sure he was following along. He has trouble pronouncing many words properly like correct syllable emphasis and a large amount of sounds (th, j/v/b, among many others). To try to make it a little more fun, for words like "the" or "jewelry," we isolated the sound and practiced it similar to a choral warm-up with sounds he could make: "jya, ji, jyu, jyeh, joe." He actually really liked this and started to do it as he read, like "she liked jya, ji, jyu-lery...jewelry." My tutee told me that he liked the story, but just hates reading so much that, despite the fact that he is embarrassed by his current skill-level and really wishes to improve, his hated of it seriously prevents him from doing so. I told him to try to find an article or two (online or otherwise) on a topic that really interested him and that I would bring different books/articles on topics of his choice for next time. We unfortunately did not get to writing this round, but plan to next time. What a session! I wish he had told me in the needs assessment about his total reading aversion!