Between school and work it has been a crazy few weeks. I love my job and have decided that I may have chosen the best career path there is. I got a job as an America Reads Tutor. I started working on the 7th and the first week I spent cutting things out for kindergarten classes while all the teachers got all the supplies together and their schedules worked out. Now that everyone has gotten their schedules down I get to teach them how to read. This is the funest and funniest thing there is. In the kindergarten class I work in three times a week we have an alphabet chart, it has the uppercase letter and the lowercase letter next to each other and then a key word picture below it like this:
Aa
(this worked a lot better in word)
And so on. So the kids start out by singing the alphabet and pointing to each letter as they say it. This is especially fun with kids who have just sung the song and don’t know the letters, because they are saying f but are still on the lowercase c, and then the whole lmnop ‘word’ is fun. Some of the students don’t seem to think it’s as funny as I do, but some of them laugh right along with me when I ask them what the picture is that their finger is on and if cat starts with an f sound. Once they can sing and point to the right letter, they say the letter name twice pointing to it each time, then they point to the picture and say what it is; the bilingual students have the hardest time with this. My favorite letters are Jj and Ll because the picture for Jj is a jack-o-lantern and Ll is one letter in Spanish. The picture for Oo is an ox, I find this one weird because none of the kindergarteners know what an ox is. Once they can do that to each letter they add the sound it makes and do the whole thing; A, a aaa, aaa, apple. Only a few students can do this but if they pass that off then they read sight words. I have now become a pro at what every letter looks like and says.
I also work with the ESL teacher. I have a list of kids to pull out of class and they love it when they see me because that means they get to go and play on the computer for 30 minutes. This is the best time of the day because all the students are happy to see me and they are quiet for 30 minutes so I can read my English book, or do other homework.
I work in a third grade class helping kids to read faster and comprehend what they read. They have a one finger space rule when writing answers which I love! They have to write their word then put a finger down and then start the next word after their finger. No trying to read one word sentences in this class, it is amazing!
In the afternoons I work with an extended day kindergarten class. All I can do is laugh. By this point the teacher has lost a lot of patience (I get there at 2) because this class is a class for the students who just aren’t learning what they need to in the regular half-day of kindergarten. The other day a student yelled at me in Spanish and then looked at me like I needed to resolve a conflict and another little boy cut his hair, again. When I leave I’m just grateful I don’t have to be there more than a half hour twice a week.
I also tutor an ESL girl, she is really smart and I’m not exactly sure why I tutor her. They said that she doesn’t comprehend what she reads but from what I’ve seen she does know what she’s reading and can answer the comprehension questions just fine.
School is ok. I’m still a little skeptical about the orchestra, it doesn’t seem like its coming together yet but it just might by our first concert. Sadly I think the easiest class is my math 1060 class, maybe just because I know exactly what is expected of me. In my education 3000 class I’m still a little confused on how and what we get graded. I’m scared for the educational psychology class because he gave us like a 12 page syllabus with like a billion assignments in it and he didn’t really go over how to do them just that they had to be done so we could pass his class. I’m also scared for the tests in this class because all he does is read from the book, that’s a lot to remember for a test. English is English, I decided that it doesn’t matter what you have to write about or the teacher, just the fact that you have to come up with 5 pages of filler to say your thoughts in the concluding paragraph is a royal waste of time.
I pretty much feel like I go to school all the time because work is at school and I’m constantly learning. I miss blue-jeans. It is against the Iron County School District dress code to wear blue-jeans, but you can wear corduroy pants and capri’s. I can get away with wearing jeans one day a week because I’m only there for like an hour in the morning and I sit behind a desk so no one can see what I’m wearing. People notice when you stop wearing jeans and they ask all sorts of questions, especially if you forget to take off your nametag as you’re running in to class. I have also learned that an appropriate wardrobe for college is not the same as an appropriate wardrobe for being in a school, you can no longer wear v neck shirts, t-shirts, or your favorite old tennis shoes. On the plus side this has taught me to be very creative with my clothes so as to fit into the dress code, I have almost found a way to wear every shirt that I have, with the exception of t-shirts, you just can’t make those professional.
