“You will be keeping a blog for this class,” isn’t exactly what I was expecting to hear on my first day in expository writing. “Ok, guess I’ll roll with it..”
The community I have chosen to join consists of teachers and tutors. As a tutor I realize my job is not to teach the original concept, but to answers questions and ensure the students fully understand it and are able to apply it. I feel my job is equally as important. Teaching a concept to a classroom is one thing, but ensuring the students grasp and are able to apply the concept is another. I am following several teacher’s blogs about what goes on in their classroom, a Tampa tutor who blogs about kids he tutors, and another AVID tutor’s blog. It should be noted the AVID is the program I work for. The program is new. It involves tutoring “at risk” high school students whose parents either did not go to college, or did not graduate high school. They are likely the first in their family to be graduating high school and likely do not think college is an option and do not know how to apply for college or realize that more people than they think take out student loans, and fill out scholarship applications on the daily. These AVID students are contractually bound to good grades and high attendance. Tutoring this one type of student should make it easy to judge whether or not the program is or is not working.
The general plan for my blog will consist of four factors: how the tutoring is and/or is not helping to prepare me for when I am teaching high school in two years, and if I believe the program is and/or is not helping he students I tutor. The students I am working with are a very select group of children. They a) want to be in the program, b) are contractually bound to show positive gains in school, and c) will be kicked out if they do or say anything inappropriate or offensive on any level. I realize that a real high school is nothing like this, but I will be able to tell if I become better at communicating with students on their level. This is not to say that I am so far removed from a high school student’s level at 21, or 23 when I begin teaching, but there will be huge differences between my students myself at that point. An issue that I plan to tackle in my blog will be judging if the program seems to help the students. I plan to assess if any of them are applying for college, if they are keeping their grades up, if the contract is enforced, if they seem to enjoy school more after joining the program and are able to get the help they need in school and preparing for college. The hard part is going to be keeping in mind that these students do not come from the same supportive and helpful home that I do, and staying patient with them and making sure we never miss a step when preparing for college.
No comments:
Post a Comment