The new kid.

Tonight marked my second week of tutoring a new kid, Fernanda. She's a sweet, shy first-grader whose older sister is in the program, and she's very smart. She's struggling to develop her English vocabulary, and she's very quiet and uncomfortable speaking out loud, but she reads and writes beautifully, and she's capable of some pretty advanced deductive reasoning. After Carlos, it's a huge breath of fresh air.

I have to be careful to make sure that I'm challenging her, though, and stressing the areas in which she needs the most help. Instead of just letting her read through the directions on the various worksheets her teacher leaves us, I have her try to tell me what the directions mean. She clearly understands the instructions, but she has a hard time explaining them. For example, tonight she understood what a complete sentence was in the sense that she could easily pick out the incomplete sentences on the worksheet, but she didn't know how to explain out loud what made a particular sentence fragment incomplete. She was able to pick out the rhyming words from a list, but she couldn't explain to me what made them rhyme. So I spent most of tonight trying to get Fernanda to open up and try to explain things to me even when she's not sure she knows all the right words. She was even afraid to answer subjective questions ("what would it be like to play cards with an octopus," for example) because she was afraid of giving the "wrong" answer and of using the wrong words.

I still can't tell if she's warming up to me or not. She lurked near my friend and me during the play period after tutoring, rather than jumping into the frenzy of pent-up-energy-burnoff (a/k/a soccer) with the other kids. And she made sure I walked with her over to the cafeteria, but then she immediately abandoned me for her dad. I'm not the most warm-fuzzy-hearts-and-puppy-dogs type of person, and I'm not exactly sure how to interact with a shy seven-year-old, but I hope we're developing a good connection and that she'll continue to work as diligently and eagerly as she has so far.

My impression is that she's got a strong family support system, that her parents are committed to her education, and that her teacher is paying some individualized attention to her. Her father is very nice and well-mannered, and Fernanda seems to have a warm and happy relationship with him. He brings both girls to the school and waits for them until the end of the session, ensuring them far more stable attendance than the last couple of kids I've tutored. He speaks passable English, and both weeks has asked me to make sure to work on Fernanda's English skills, so he seems to recognize how important English will be to Fernanda's educational progress in the U.S.

So after two weeks, I'm excited about working with this kid who seems excited about learning, and I hope I can have some positive impact in her world. That's perhaps an unrealistic assumption, given that we have barely two months of school left, but if she stays at this school, she'll be able to continue in the tutoring program for as long as she wants. The population at my school is pretty transient, but the family seems stable. I'm hopeful . . . .