[Note, names have been changed and details have been left out to protect student privacy. For my last log see this link.]
My third session with Juan was on a Thursday a week after my second session.
When I got to the multi-purpose
room where they hold the STAR program, they had rearranged all of the
cafeteria tables where the kids sit. They had also come up
with a new seating chart. It sounded like they had made all these
changes because the teachers and the parents weren't very happy with
the progress of the STAR sessions. It also sounded like they felt
that the kids were
doing too much playing around instead of doing their homework.
I'm not sure how much homework the students actually get done in the
STAR program, because the ratio of tutors to students is pretty low,
and all the kids have different homework that they are doing. So,
the kids are largely self-directed most of the time. Some of the
kids seem to do all right at focusing their energies into homework, but
a lot of the kids have trouble (which I guess I would expect at their
age).
Anyway, I'm not sure if all these changes had anything to do with Juan's behavior that day, or maybe it was the fact that the weather was changing and rain was coming, but I've never seen him quite so uninterested in doing his schoolwork. He spent a large part of the session yawning, trying to put his head on the table, and just generally squirming. Of course, when one of his classmate tried to distract him he seemed energetic enough.
A lot of Juan's homework for this session had to do with writing
words in alphabetical order. He understood the easy cases well
enough (like putting "apple" before "big"), but he seemed to have more
trouble with alphabetizing based on letters after the first letter
(like "apple" and "apply", for instance). Even for simple cases,
this seems like a hard assignment for kids his age because they have
to go through the whole alphabet song every time they try to figure out
which letter comes first. Maybe next time I should have Juan
write out the alphabet on a key that he can use for the rest of the
assignment. On one especially tricky alphabetizing assignment, I
started to notice he was just making pure guesses waiting for me to
tell him if he got the answer right or not. In his current
squirmy mood I couldn't quite talk him into thinking it through for
himself, so I decided to move onto something easier - rather than
finish that assignment by telling him all the answers. I was
going to go back to the hard assignment later, but by the end of the
session I felt like we had done enough for that day.
I think I'm going to have to think of strategies for making homework
a little more interesting when Juan is not in the mood to do it.
I might have to resort to bribes or something. I guess this
session gave me something to think about in terms of techniques for
motivating students - so it definitely was a good session in its own
way. We'll see if I can think up anything before the next session.