Mohini
First Semester Junior Year
Reading Partners
Caila
The goal of my PACT project was to help the problem of
education in underprivileged communities and schools. At Selby Lane, I had the
opportunity to tutor young elementary school students in reading, to help them
catch up to the level they should be at in their respective grades. For the
first three visits, I spent my time tutoring a girl named Isabella. I’ve spent
a lot of my time tutoring kids and I tended to be pretty good at it but I’d
went into it under the assumption that the experience I had before would be the
same as what I was going have teaching under privileged students. The first
thing I noticed about Isabella was her desire to learn. At the beginning of
each session, I was supposed to read a book of her choosing to her, but she would
constantly ask if she could read it, and always wanted to complete book
reports. Every once in a while though, Isabella would seem disengaged, and I
was told by the Reading Partners site manager that it had to do with problems
that were occurring at home. Although, Isabella never opened up to me about
what was going on, it was difficult for me to balance the empathy I had, that
wanted me to let her do her own thing and just have fun while at reading
partners with the fact that she did in fact need to use all the time she had
with me improving on her reading. This was an issue I hadn’t anticipated and I
haven’t yet figured out exactly how to deal with situations like these, but
I’ve found that playing games has helped.
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