Journal #9
March 23, 2011
8:30-10:30 (2 hours)
Today was an interesting day. When I first saw Oscar today he looked a little angry and flustered. As we walked to the library I asked him the same questions I always ask him on this short trip. How is your day so far? What did you do this last weekend? Do you have any homework you need help with? Oscar kept responding in Spanish to each question then would shake his head, make a frustrated sound and then try to respond in English. When he did get to his English sentence he would intermix Spanish words – notice what he was doing and then get even more frustrated. When we finally got to the library he sat down and pulled out his English homework. Then, he looked at me expectedly. At the start of every lesson, especially when Oscar has other homework to work on, we have been making it a point to first review the tongue twisters Oscar learned a few weeks ago. Today did not go so well. Oscar had a lot of trouble with some tongue twisters that he had mastered in the several sessions before this one. After he attempted to read one he is normally good at I asked him to read it again – to which he frowned and grunted a little because he knew he had only needed to read it once in the weeks before. Obviously, I decided to be more encouraging to Oscar rather than draw attention to the fact that he was making mistakes. So, after reading through the rest of the cards once we moved on to the English homework he needed help with. The homework he had involved reading a small excerpt and then answering some comprehension questions about the passage. I asked Oscar to first read the passage in his head and then to read it aloud. When it came time to read aloud I noticed he was having more difficulty with pronunciation than normal. He really seemed to be struggling today. I remembered having some days when I was on SST when I was just tired of the language and couldn’t seem to put it together properly. It was on these days I just wanted to be by myself and forget that I was learning a new language. It was difficult to understand others and I just needed to sleep before I could be good at the language again (at least so it seemed). Unfortunately, I had no clue what to do to help Oscar through this situation. So, he continued reading and when he came to the end, we tried to work through the questions. I showed him how to look for some key words, which I’m pretty sure he already knew how to do – and we tried to work through the sheet together. We spent the rest of the time working on this in a frustrated state and I felt horrible because I did not know what to do to help Oscar so just tried to keep encouraging him. I reminded him that it was okay to make mistakes and to just keep working on it. I was also careful not to push him too hard today. I didn’t want to create even more frustration for him than he already seemed to be having.
At the very end of the meeting I decided to tell Oscar that my professor would be coming to visit and observe during one of our sessions. Generally, Oscar is a little insecure about letting others see that he is working with a tutor and we will go to a silent corner of the library to do our work because it’s what he prefers. So, I told him Skip would be coming. He seemed a little nervous at first but when I explained a little more that the professor was there to watch me he started to feel a lot better about the situation and said he was totally fine with it. I think it might be good for him to see someone else being critiqued (in a sense). It may actually make him even more comfortable because he will be able to realize he is not being critiqued. So, at the end of the meeting, Oscar agreed and stood up to walk away. Normally, I am the first to say Bye to Oscar but today Oscar said “see you next week.” Even though it was a tough speaking day for him, I was really proud he decided to take the effort to say this and I look forward to our next meeting – when, hopefully, Oscar will have recovered from his frustrated with English day.
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