Discouraged

When we lived in India, I spent a lot of my time and effort in fund raising.  If you're living somewhere like that, where the need is endless and everywhere, it's hard not to want to do something.  Turns out, for a variety of reasons, I was pretty good at raising money for the groups I was working with.  And even better, after setting the bar much higher than it had been before, those who came after me were encouraged to do as well, if not better.

When we moved back to the States, to this place in particular, it became apparent that fund raising was not going to be my thing; again, for a variety of reasons.  So I decided, after years of being interested in it, to finally take an adult literacy training course and get involved with that.  I am volunteering through the library system and have been working with my tutee since late September.

She is a middle aged woman who reads at about a grade 4 level.  She somehow made it through high school and is working, but wants to go to college and get a better job.  She is incredibly motivated and takes this very seriously.  But teaching her how to read is not the goal.  She wants to be able to take the college's placement tests and do well enough to not have to take remedial classes (which she would have to pay for).  So I am actually teaching English, or language arts, rather than literacy.

We started with the very basics (parts of a sentence) and have covered verb tenses, subject/verb agreement, possessives, contractions, capitalization, punctuation--all of the usual grammar stuff.  It has been an incredible experience for me, a person who is so language oriented.  The first stumbling block was realizing that I had to explain things that I knew intuitively--and how difficult that can be.  The second was to realize that no matter how many times we go over the same thing, none of this is ever going to be intuitive for her.

I have come to believe that a great deal of her problem is her inability to remember things--and I believe it's a learning disability rather than a habit or behavior.  Today she read the word 'apostrophe' 3 or 4 times in a span of 5 or 6 sentences.  Not once did she recognize it; each time she had to sound it out again as if she had never seen it before.  She also has difficulty reading the words that are actually written, and will do things like move an 's' from the noun to the verb ('the door opens' becomes 'the doors open') or drop the n't from the end of a contraction, completely changing the meaning of the sentence.  The exam she will eventually have to take will, in one section, give her a sentence and then 5 options for changing it (one being 'no change').  If she can't read what's written, she'll never be able to get through that.  And in terms of figuring out what's wrong, she has to have a working knowledge of the rules.  But even though we go over a very limited number of concepts each session, her homework reflects her inability to retain the material. 

We work with 3 different workbooks.  I have her read aloud the concept and then we do exercises together.  I explain the concept and she takes notes.  I make her rewrite her notes into a binder and copy the rules from one of the workbooks into the binder as well, both as homework.  I bring her other worksheets.  I have her write short essays.  We have color coded every part of speech in a sentence.  And no matter what I/we do, I just don't have the feeling that it's getting through in any kind of permanent way.  In fact, the next thing I had planned to work on was going to be writing skills, but I suspect that if I gave her a test on the things we've done so far, she would be completely lost.  So I don't know what to do--go back and start again?  I think we will spend the next session, at least, in a review.  I will search the internet for comprehensive grammar tests for us to work from, as I am running out of materials of my own at this point.  I am very discouraged--I don't think it is realistic for her to plan on taking the placement tests this year if she wants to avoid remedial classes...but I also wonder if the remedial classes might not be more effective for her than I have been.

On the positive side, she is currently beginning her third novel.  Until we started working together, she had never read a novel.  I started her with The Secret Life of Bees, then gave her Where the Heart Is, and now she's reading The Bean Trees.  I am thinking about The Color Purple next.  So there is that...  But it isn't helping me feel any less discouraged at the moment.