Tutoring

People like to ask me what I do during the day. My normal answers include: reading, knitting, watching movies, visiting the library, etc. Now I have a new answer! For almost 2 weeks now, I've been working as a tutor for a high school nearly 30 miles away (essentially on the other end of the county). You'd probably assume that I'd be tutoring in either biology or chemistry, since those are the two subjects I studied for 4 years in college.

Yeah, you'd be wrong.

I'm tutoring 2 (formerly 3, but we'll get to that in a minute) students who need extra help passing the Alabama high school graduation exam, which, according to what I read online, they have had a chance to pass since their sophomore year. They are now seniors. I'm teaching them social studies (read: US History), reading comprehension, and grammar. You'd think that they might be a little behind, but they couldn't be too far gone...after all, they've made it through almost 4 years of high school.

Let me put it this way: None of them could tell me who won World War II, who fought in WWII, who the leader of Germany was during WWII, and, my two personal favorites, who Abe Lincoln was and who won the Civil War (just in case, I also called it the War Between the States and the War of Northern Aggression. First guess: Britain. Second guess: the South.).

I've been quizzing them constantly on history facts, as well as teaching them what nouns, verbs, and pronouns are, as well as subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement (and yes, they do know now exactly what an antecedent is....if I have taught them nothing else, I have taught them that. Oh, and what year Alabama became a state. Priorities, people.), and the absolute basics of punctuation. I've also made them practice a lot of reading comprehension selections. I'm proud to say they're doing much better. Well, the two I'm still helping are doing better...the other has taken a job at McDonalds, and so no longer attends tutoring. They've been respectful of me and pretty attentive, although one likes to argue with me about what he thinks he needs to do and when he needs to do it.

Next week is the last week I have with them, which means I have 6 days (5 days next week plus tomorrow) to teach them 200 years of US History (minus the few facts I've managed to teach them) and a lot more grammar, including proper comma usage (I'm a little scared to do that...it might be the blind leading the blind there). We'll see how this goes...more stories about this experience may come later. Prayer, as always, is much appreciated, both for this and for my continued job search. :) Oh, and if anyone has any tips about how to cram 200 years of history and many school-years worth of grammar into 6 days, let me know.