osprey_archer | Entries tagged with school

Testing week, testing week! We just had testing week, and I have a bright and shiny new list of students who I can work with! There are a lot of first graders. A lot of first graders. Oh dear.

The person in charge of data entry used to be in Reading Corps, just like I am now. I basically ended up haunting her office to get my data, and she said to me, bemused, "When I was in Reading Corps I wanted the scores too, but I could barely bring myself to ask for them."

Which surprised me, because she seemed to me such a self-confident person - and, while I'm self-confident in some things, asking for favors isn't one of them. But this isn't really a favor. I need these scores; it's not like I'm asking for something special.

***

One thing I worried about, before I started my job, was that all my students would be as dumb as rocks and I would eventually explode from exasperation.

But this hasn't been a problem. There are a couple who I would wager are, in fact, as dumb as rocks, but it turns out I'm more patient than I thought. And nothing's set in stone at this stage; some of them are just late bloomers. One of my former students has surged ahead to become one of the best readers in her class - still not the fastest; but she reads and reads and reads, and speed will come in time.

We've reached the midpoint of the school year here, which is a handy random point to pause and reflect on my experiences as a reading tutor.

Mostly it's been lovely. I've always wanted to work in an elementary school, and knew I wouldn't last as a classroom teacher - too much dealing with discipline problems, not enough time to work with individual students, and way too much multitasking. Tutoring is a perfect fit: working one on one with kids, teaching them to do my favorite thing in the world!

Naturally there are some days when I simply can't stand the sight of the alphabet anymore, and I still haven't gotten used to getting up at six, but in the main I'm glad I took the job.

And I'm glad I'm doing it here. The school I'm working at has a marvelous esprit de corps. One of the paraprofessionals got a new job in IT somewhere - and no one knew he was leaving till this week - but they threw together a potluck lunch for this Friday to see him off in style.

Someone brought elk chili. Minnesota, I love you.

Partly the esprit de corps is because it's small - most of the grades have just three teachers. The kids are tracked into different reading or math groups, and change teachers for those classes, so the teachers generally know all the students in their grade.

(When I was growing up my school didn't even begin tracking till fifth grade. But it makes so much sense! It must be so much easier to teach when you have a narrower spread of abilities in the classroom.)

But it's not just an internal esprit de corps. The school feels rooted in the community. Not only do people who live here tend to stay, but many of them have lots of family in the area too: most of my students comment offhand that they saw their cousins or grandparents or whoever this weekend.

"Do they live close by?" I ask.

"No," they reply serenely. "They live in [town fifteen minutes away]."

I grew up in a university town, which is in some ways similar: half the parents have tenure and therefore few people move away. But in a university town, almost no one's relatives live close. I was unusual in that I had grandparents who lived in the same state. (Five hours away, but still in the same state.)

Here there's a whole program for grandparents in the community to come in and help out.

And one of the kindergartner's parents don't speak Spanish, so her teacher contacted the high school Spanish program and has them translate her report cards, her weekly letters home, etc.

And there are high schoolers who come over here to tutor the elementary students or read to them.

I feel like a knot in a net. I may not be able to help all the students that we need to help (although I'm doing my darndest; we got through all the first graders on my waiting list!), but someone else will be there. We're all working together, and we will not let them fall.

From the office of small and possibly anal-retentive complaints: I use pre-written passages with the second-graders I work with, and some of those passages are poems, which I would really like except that the poems don't scan.

This doesn't trip up the slower kids - they're still having problems with the individual words, so they don't get a rhythm going when they read - but I have one girl who reads with great expression, and is on the cusp of reading fluently, and it messes her up.

Because she's adding words, or subtracting words, or changing whole lines so they match the rhythm. For instance. One of the poems has the line "Good for breakfast, snack, lunch, and dinner," which she read as "Good for breakfast, good for dinner."

Her version is so much better. Her version actually scans, and also has the repetition so essential to excellent nonsense rhymes.

Because of the impending holiday, I've been giving books to my students left and right this week. (What do you mean, Thanksgiving isn't a gift-giving holiday? All holidays are for gift-giving. I fully intend to inflict books on my students for St. Patrick's Day.)

As I've found a place where I can buy them for fifty cents, I've started a small stock of picture books for my first graders. My favorite first grader picked Roxaboxen! Has anyone else read Roxaboxen? It's about a bunch of kids who build an imaginary town in the desert using white stones and desert glass - "amethyst, amber, and sea-green." I looooooved it when I was a little kid.

My student seemed to find it a little puzzling when I read it to her, but no doubt she'll grow to love it over time.

I also have Miss Rumphius, which we always called The Lupine Lady because it's about Miss Rumphius wandering the countryside spreading lupine seeds to make the world more beautiful. Best book EVER!

We are finally - FINALLY! - getting started, testing the kids' reading speeds. Most of them take it in stride, although some of the sixth graders are already displaying the stigmata of test anxiety. They jiggle so hard it shakes the table, make silly errors, get fuddled in their words and pinched about the face as they read. It hurts.

"Ready?" I say. "Take a deeeeeeeeeep breath."

Sometimes it helps, and sometimes it doesn't.

I can feel myself falling into the attitude that so irritated me, sometimes, when I was younger (and sometimes irritates me still, when older people direct it at me): seeing and bleeding for the child's pain, thinking that there's something, or ought to be something, that I can do to stop it, and believing that I understand. Understand better than they do, even.

There is something infinitely condescending about believing that you understand someone else - someone you hardly know, yet - as if they were uncomplicated and could not contain multitudes. I know too many people who pride themselves on their empathy, and occasionally take it upon themselves to explain to me how I feel, except that they're totally wrong.

Sometimes I doubt the value of empathy. Not only does it lead people astray, so they believe they know how you're feeling and don't ask, but it also paralyzes them: they feel other people's pain so strongly that they can't bear to be there when other people hurt. I don't see that it doesn't anything that sympathy can't do better and at less cost. Sympathetic people don't take it as a personal affront when you tell them that, actually, they don't understand nearly as well as they think they do.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I don't feel this rush of fake understanding with the kindergartners and second graders that I'll be working with. I find them adorable but slightly perplexing, especially the kindergartners: it's impossible to hold a coherent conversation with them, as they won't stay on topic for more than a couple of sentences. This is going to make teaching them - interesting.

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with school

Testing, testing one two three!

Halfway there

Adventures in poetry

Roxaboxen

On empathy

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January 2026

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