1. I camp out in the Tutor Center when I hold individual conferences with my students. This morning, I admired a man who is about nineteen or twenty years old tutoring another man who must be over thirty years older than him in math. They worked together for at least three hours, the tutor slowly, patiently guiding the older man's thinking, helping, but never doing his work for him, never expressing any frustration, just steadily helping him. What a good kid.
2. When I can, I try to open the way for my students to write about experience they've had that parallels what we've read in poems. Rumi is a mystic. He's an ecstatic poet. He explores human longing for union with the Divine. If students want to, they can write an essay exploring one of their own ecstatic experiences or they can explore their own experience with longing. It's fun reading these papers as my students take me whizzing down Willamette Pass on a snowboard, skydiving in Creswell, climbing the South Sister, being enlightened by hallucination, fishing with Dad at dawn at Lake in the Woods, and on and on. I think these students enjoy feeling like they can be Rumi in their own ways.
3. Tonight's dinner was a joint family effort. I roasted the pork loin roast (beautifully). Deke made rich and smooth gravy. Molly boiled and mashed the potatoes and prepared the broccoli. Olivia formed new words and continued to totter on the brink of sentence making.
1 comment:
I too appreciate the help of young math tutors. I am in the Trio program and a couple of 20-something young men helped me pass math 65 with complete patience and good instruction. Unlike some math instructors I have had, neither of them have made me feel like I was wasting their time. Yet they tutor for free, while my instructors are paid. Thank God for tutors!
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