Learning through doing

Jazmin:  “what does c*** mean?”

Me: … what?

Jazmin: “c***”

Me: huh? Wait. What? (thinking to myself I must have heard wrong)

Jazmin: “c***!”

It wasn’t a conversation I prepared for. And it certainly was not a conversation I anticipated having, but it came up nonetheless.

***

Tajonna: “I have a job.”

Me: “Oh yeah?”

Tajonna: “I am a speaker.”

Me: “What do you speak about?”

Tajonna: “How I used to be homeless”

***

Throughout our sessions at MHS, I’ve tutored three very different students. There was Andy, who never made eye contact with me. Jazmin, who was a bit quiet but also really pushed me to help her keep focus and prompted me to guide outside her outside of academic conversations. And, finally, Tajonna, who taught me what a 13 year old can really accomplish. Looking back on my first post from MHS, I was a bit worried with how I interacted with Andy because we literally—and I guess figuratively as well—didn’t see eye to eye. However, when I started working with Jazmin, she challenged me in both my tutoring and how I viewed my role within this experience. In the above conversation, Jazmin came to me for more than just tutoring advice, and while I was uncomfortable talking to her about this word, I wanted to because she kept asking me about something she didn’t know. And she found me approachable enough to ask this question. It may not have been a tutoring question, but what I got out of it was a feeling that somehow I connected with Jazmin enough for her to listen to my response and hear me out.

In our final day of tutoring, I worked with Tajonna since Jazmin wasn’t there.  While I helped Tajonna on grammar and revision, she taught me how much confidence and drive a 13 year old has to use.  In our revising, we talked about how her subject (a model) had to go through so much work in order to get to where she was. Tajonna wanted to add that part into her narrative because she said that that’s a goal of her own—to show people how hard work can help you get to a better place and that you have to overcome difficult things for resolutions. I only worked with Tajonna once, but in our hour together, Tajonna and I did accomplish something: we read through her narrative, added transitions, talked about grammar, and made sure that the main point that she wanted to come across did. And she finished her narrative. That, to me, is an accomplishment.

 Each of my students was difficult in various ways, but overall I feel as if I accomplished something personally: I learned to relax a bit more in my tutoring, to not try and overpower the sessions. And I connected with my students and learned from them. I was a little concerned, going into this, how 13 and 14 year olds would react to me, but I enjoyed chatting with them, and I liked how they kept challenging me in my tutoring and in my personal interactions with them.