bad tutor
As part of my general recent self-improvement kick, I've been tutoring some high school kids getting ready to take the SAT. Figured it was about time that I do something volunteerish, and there have been many times in my life when I've felt that taking standardized tests was my unique, special skill.
New York Cares has a program whereby I got some training pro bono from Kaplan, and then was paired up with a couple of kids at a local public school. Our sessions are only 2 hours per week, on Saturday mornings, but I've been into it, and if nothing else, the guys will at least have a very good sense of what they're in for, and will have done a ton of practice, and hopefully picked up some tricks of the standardized test trade, before they sit down to write the exam.
Actually, I was feeling like I was doing a pretty good job as a tutor. Both my parents are teachers, I figured education was sort of in my blood, and it seemed to be showing.
Until a couple of weeks ago, that is. We were running through some math practice when Carlos, one of my charges, says to me kind of out of the blue, "You know, Joe, you're a very monogamous person."
Normally, I'm one for the witty comeback; finding me at a loss for words is a very rare thing. But I must admit, I blinked once or twice, and the best my eloquent mind could manage by way of a reply was, "Um, I'm WHAT?"
And poor Carlos repeats himself: "You know, monogamous. You're a monogamous person to be tutoring us like this."
I got it. Gently, deploying my tutoring skills, I guided him in the right direction: "Oh! You mean magnanimous."
Carlos: "Right, right...magnanimous. So, uh, what does monogamous mean?" (As he's flipping through the lesson book to the relevant vocabulary page.)
Me: "Well, it means you date or marry only one person at a time and you don't cheat on them." And in my head I appended "I guess it's an accurate statement, at least theoretically." But (see, Monique, I do have some tact, albeit rarely) I opted not to say that part out loud.
And the moral of this story is, don't go thinking you're an excellent SAT tutor until after you've done a ton of thorough vocabulary drills.
Epilogue. In happier news, Carlos decided a better word for me is actually "nefarious," proving himself a good judge of character. And at our session today, the word "melee" came up, and he suggested that it meant "fight or battle," because he knew it in the context of the Gamecube title "Super Smash Brothers Melee." Who says video games don't teach you anything?
New York Cares has a program whereby I got some training pro bono from Kaplan, and then was paired up with a couple of kids at a local public school. Our sessions are only 2 hours per week, on Saturday mornings, but I've been into it, and if nothing else, the guys will at least have a very good sense of what they're in for, and will have done a ton of practice, and hopefully picked up some tricks of the standardized test trade, before they sit down to write the exam.
Actually, I was feeling like I was doing a pretty good job as a tutor. Both my parents are teachers, I figured education was sort of in my blood, and it seemed to be showing.
Until a couple of weeks ago, that is. We were running through some math practice when Carlos, one of my charges, says to me kind of out of the blue, "You know, Joe, you're a very monogamous person."
Normally, I'm one for the witty comeback; finding me at a loss for words is a very rare thing. But I must admit, I blinked once or twice, and the best my eloquent mind could manage by way of a reply was, "Um, I'm WHAT?"
And poor Carlos repeats himself: "You know, monogamous. You're a monogamous person to be tutoring us like this."
I got it. Gently, deploying my tutoring skills, I guided him in the right direction: "Oh! You mean magnanimous."
Carlos: "Right, right...magnanimous. So, uh, what does monogamous mean?" (As he's flipping through the lesson book to the relevant vocabulary page.)
Me: "Well, it means you date or marry only one person at a time and you don't cheat on them." And in my head I appended "I guess it's an accurate statement, at least theoretically." But (see, Monique, I do have some tact, albeit rarely) I opted not to say that part out loud.
And the moral of this story is, don't go thinking you're an excellent SAT tutor until after you've done a ton of thorough vocabulary drills.
Epilogue. In happier news, Carlos decided a better word for me is actually "nefarious," proving himself a good judge of character. And at our session today, the word "melee" came up, and he suggested that it meant "fight or battle," because he knew it in the context of the Gamecube title "Super Smash Brothers Melee." Who says video games don't teach you anything?
posted by gloomyjoe at 11:38 PM
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