Tuesday

I got up this morning late for me–around 9:30 and since it was snowing heavily, decided not to go for a walk.

I went round to Robin’s apartment for tutoring at one and she was really worried about a narrative essay she had to write on a good experience. She decided to write about the birth of her son and so I helped her make one of those prewriting webs where you put the main idea in the center and then branch out into paragraphs. I am trying to teach her three skills in her essay writing. First, I want her to be aware of her reader and what her reader wants to know. I told her to try to imagine what I was going to ask next and she did very well with that concept. The second skill I am helping her with is to use transitional devices which are like little "hooks" to link one paragraph into another. For example, one can use a word from the last sentence in the first sentence of a new paragraph, or begin a new new paragraph with a pronoun whose antecedant is quite clearly in the last sentence of the previous paragraph. She is doing well with this too and and is beginning to point out out to me places where she is doing this without any prompting from me.

The third thing I keep emphasizing is that in a draft, errors don’t matter. In the beginning, she kept wanting to go back and correct every fiddling little mistake she was making, and, of course, she lost her train of thought then. Finally I had to tell her NOT to correct spellings as she went along! She knows about the spell checker and uses it, but still tries to correct herself as she goes along. In this she was very like most of my seventh graders who found the concept of a rewrite very difficult to grasp. Of course, once they realized how easy this was with a word processor, they were much more relaxed about the whole thing.

Last week, because she was not well, she missed the second tutoring session, so I told her if she was doing Ok with it, we could go on for another hour. She was and we did. Tomorrow I will go round there at 12:30 for the second session this week. We have it earlier on Tuesdays because at 2 she has to get on a bus and go downtown for algebra tutoring. I really admire her for all the hard work she is doing and I tell her so often.

I am now at home and as soon as Fred has finished watching the weather channel, I am putting in my new Netflix DVD of Foyle’s War and going to try to walk for 30 minutes. Try is the operative word because it is later in the afternoon and any energy I had is rapidly failing but no matter how little I do, it is better than none, right?

Until later..