Lila's Final Post

Lila Gornick
5/19/15, 3:20 4:20
Boys and Girls Club
Fabiola Kerfoot
fkerfoot@bgcp.org

I tutored at Taft for more than just five weeks and my last day tutoring there was May 19^th.  On my last day at Taft I was instructed to just play with my student instead of tutoring so we could just have fun on our last day together.  This was probably for the best, because my student had an extreme energy level that afternoon and I knew she wouldn’t have been able to focus on reading.  Watching her and her peers wildly seesaw and draw on the board didn’t seem productive to me, and in the beginning I was questioning why I was even there, but then I began to realize that a lot of these kids don’t have anyone to take them to a park or a jungle gym after school to get their energy out before doing their homework, and my presence allowed them to get some of their energy out before they went back to the classroom.   Even though I wished I could’ve dramatically improved my student’s reading capability over the course of the weeks I tutored at Taft, I realized that encouraging her to read and practice reading books in English and giving her one on one attention was just as important as getting the results of better reading.  The experience of tutoring an elementary student after she had a full day of school gave me practice in being patient because by the end of the day the students were usually exhausted and had a hard time concentrating on reading so I had to be patient when she would lose her focus on the book we were reading.