Lincoln Elementary

Alright guys, I'm going to be really upfront with this: my blog today is going to be about the tutoring I did at Lincoln this afternoon, and I'm going to hope I'll find a connection to the writing center by the end of it. It may be a stretch.

So for my Philosophical Perspectives in Education class, we're tutoring for an hour once a week, every week, at Lincoln Elementary school. The way they set up the tutoring is that we are each paired with a student from one of the classes, and we sit with that student during their scheduled "reading block" and help them with whatever they need. Basically we join in on the class, focusing on one particular student. Not all of the students get tutors.

Lincoln Elementary is consistently producing poor reading scores on state tests. To fix this problem, the school has decided to focus on the "bubble students": students that are in the middle ground. Bubble students are failing tests, but they aren't so far gone that they can't be helped. These bubble students are assigned Wittenberg tutors. Not all of the students get a tutor. In my class, for example, its just me and one other guy from my education class who are serving as tutors.

Today was different from how most of our tutoring days will be, however, because it was "Book Share presentation day". Instead of working side by side with a student, we sat in the corner and observed. I felt pretty fortunate to have my first day at Lincoln be an observation day; I was able to learn a lot about the kind of culture that exists within the Springfield City schools.

My apologies to any native Springfielders who may be offended by my description of Lincoln and its students, but Lincoln is Springfield's worst school. It is in the heart of one of the worst parts of Springfield. The school itself may look nice with its new renovations, but its appearance is a facade. The school houses students who are consistently behind what is expected for their grade level. Not only are the students behind in reading and math, but they are also behind in social expectations.

I've never seen a class of sixth graders so disrespectful. These kids are what, twelve? And it's like no one has ever taught them how they are supposed to act in a classroom. They were all running around up out of their seats, yelling out, and over all just being rude. The teacher had to ask them several times to sit back down, listen, pay attention. I was surprised by the disrespect. The students talked back to the teacher, denying her command to do anything productive.

Once the presentations started, I realized this was a group of sixth graders unlike any class I had seen before. The range of their skill level was astonishing. While one sixth graders had a well organized report on the lengthy, 750 page final book of the Twilight series, another student had a vague report on a book that seemed to be the intellectual equivalent of Go Dog, Go or whatever. It was such a strange comparison. These students were all over the place. Someone from my class who had tutored earlier this week said that his sixth grader didn't know the differences between "there, their, they're," and he couldn't begin to spell any of them! He wrote "ther". He's in the sixth grade.

I met the girl that I will be working with these next few weeks. Her name is Selena. At the end of the class, I got to sit next to her for five minutes or so while she did a reading comprehension activity, and she seems pretty bright. I can't wait to start working with her and see the problems that might arise. Maybe I'll test some of the tutoring theories we've discussed in class, though with a younger student it might help to be a bit more direct than our advisers generally are in the Center.