another nice little normal “real life” evening last night. i went home, ate a snack, headed out to run errands. first stop was linens ‘n things for wine bottle stoppers, one of those candle lighter thingys, a kitchen timer, and a grease strainer. then to best buy for a new camera for nick. then to payless and finally kohl’s in search of black boots, which i found. hurrah. it’s official, i am an old woman. {sigh}
this morning when i arrived at the elementary school, i found out that diego, my tutee, won’t be coming anymore because his teacher wants to keep him in class to prepare for the texas state tests, held in april. i have issues with this: 1) the test isn’t until april, 2) i don’t think teachers should be teaching to the test anyway, and 3) one hour a week one-on-one with a tutor is much more valuable to a child than spending that hour in a class of 30. individual attention is invaluable. not to mention that diego and i were really starting to have some fun, and i’m disappointed to not be working with him anymore.
instead, it looks like i will now be tutoring new immigrants (it’s a bilingual elementary school), meaning they speak little to no english. and i speak little to no spanish, meaning that i have no obvious way of communicating with these kids. talk about frustrating! today i worked with a 4th-grade boy going over alphabet flash cards. ms. arredondo (the bilingual tutoring person) explained to him that i would say the letter and he would repeat it. then i would say the animal pictured on the back and he would repeat it. so that’s what we did for 45 minutes, me saying the word and him repeating it. after one run though the cards, i put them up to see if he could tell me without me saying it first, and he did ok. it’s obvious that he can read in spanish; he just has to start learning english now.
so i guess that’s what i’ll be doing. but it is frustrating. i know that these kids need the practice, they need someone to sit down and go over english pronounciations and such…it’s just frustrating to be unable to communicate with them. i don’t feel like i can be very effective when i can’t talk to them. i feel like the person tutoring these kids should really be someone who can speak at least some spanish. but i guess we’ll see how it goes.
france soon!
(3:14 p.m.)
i forgot to mention that i posted some new pictures the other day. maybe you already found them, but if not, there are pictures of my bedroom furniture and of the x-38 being moved from building 13 to its permanent resting site in building 220. this was last friday. the project is in its shutdown phase due to budget woes, and there was a small parade of people who used to work on the project following it. it’s not everyday a spacecraft rolls down the street. 🙂
(3:25 p.m.)
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