Tutoring

December has come, and nearly gone. After a turbulent re-entry to the United Sates I am finally feeling settled into my life here in Saint Louis. It is currently winter break from my tutor position with 3rd graders at Woodward Elementary School.

The last day of school there was a holiday assembly. A 5th grader introduced the goals of the assembly. He expressed gratefulness for living in the United States where every child can go to school and get a free, quality education. These words stung my eyes, and the water works continued as a gym full of innocent, undereducated, underprivileged children stood for “My Country Tis of Thee”. The meritocracy and greatness of this country has never seemed more like indoctrination.

My school isn’t the worst of the worst, but there are kids in every class who can’t read. There are third graders who still don’t know their letters. Kids who qualify for an individualized education plan have a teacher who doesn’t even know what the unique educational needs of their students are. It’s hard to know those needs when the school doesn’t have records to show what those needs are. Who is this glorious free education serving? My education prepared me to be a life-long learner, but the kids in Saint Louis don’t have the same opportunity.

The students are adorable, and they are progressing. All of my kids know their letters now, and they are mastering the basic sight words taught in Kindergarten. Teaching comprehension and writing to those who aren’t as devastatingly behind is more challenging than teaching phonetics to the lower level students. I’m struggling to reach one student who has no motivation even when the subject has been carefully tailored to his interests.

Prior to this service I had a romantic view of passion as contagious. I assumed that my passion for words, letters, and stories, would automatically influence the students to be hypnotized by reading. I don’t write passion off as completely incommunicable, it’s just that these kids have some powerful anti-bodies built up.

Poverty seems harsher here than in the school I worked at in France. My students talk about guns, drugs, and violence. Several of my children have bad breath, and obvious dental problems. Over 90% of children at Woodward eat free breakfast, and lunch at school. The kids don’t have a play ground, and the school is locked. I’ve never been to a school in the States that is locked.

I’m learning and growing, and I’m hoping to help my kids on their path as well. Since September I’ve been reading exclusively children’s literature and pedagogical theory. I suspect this will be my literary diet until the end of my service. I’m sure that even so there is much I need to learn about the skill of imparting knowledge.

And so it is. I try to let it be just like that. Perhaps I’m not as effective as I could be if I were more experienced and trained or if I had more time with the kids. (I regularly fantasize about kidnapping my students and raising them in a carefully constructed dream world.) But I figure there is nothing I can do to hurt these kids, so I patiently cultivate and nurture to the best of my ability.