(no subject)
Sep. 3rd, 2012 02:37 pmSemi-related: if you call a school for sick children and tell them you can tutor high school math and science, they will call you back very quickly.
Me: I'm a bad fit with my current tutee. Can I switch?
Lady running program: You know, I don't even think she needs tutoring, she's only in there 'cause her brother is.
Me: She's reading several grade levels behind and doesn't know odds/evens
Lady: Thanks for the input, but our other students are worse. Let me talk to her teacher and see if she'd like to swap in another student instead.
First, let's all take a moment to be depressed that a nine year old who appears to not know what "first" means is getting kicked out of tutoring because she's not needy enough.
Second, I didn't mention the gift demands to the Lady, but the fact is, I wouldn't have asked to switch if it wasn't for them. So she's being taught that demanding things makes you lose opportunities, which seems like a good lesson, assuming she wants the tutoring and doesn't misread this as "demanding things gets you out of schoolwork". Except there's a lot of research showing that a sense of entitlement, in the neutral to positive sense of the word, is one of the major distinguishing features between middle class and poor children (see: The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell). And however much she needs to learn not to demand candy from strangers who are helping her with her homework, she also needs to learn to demand the doctor pay attention to her symptoms.
Third, some of her issues are clearly motivational, not knowledge based, although I'm not competent to tease them apart. And if she's viewing her tutor as a source of gifts, she's clearly not taking full advantage of the tutoring program. So maybe her being replaced by a kid who is even further behind and/or will take fuller advantage of the tutoring is a good thing, even if it sucks for this one little girl. Like crystalpyramid said, I can't view this as me helping one person, I have to view it as me participating with lots of other people in a system that helps lots of kids. At a bare minimum I'm preventing the burn out of a more competent tutor while exposing kids to a female engineer. If this kid doesn't get any more than that, that's sad, but it doesn't automatically mean the system, or I, failed. But it's still depressing as hell.
Bonus depressing systems fact of the day, courtesy of Unequal Childhoods by Annette Larue: middle class kids grown up in an environment where they're encouraged to meet people's eyes. Many poor kids grow up in an environment where prolonged eye contact is an invitation to violence. Employers think eye contact denotes trustworthiness.