Maybe I should just get a computer job instead.

♦ January 15, 2012 ♦ Leave a comment

This will probably all end up in my paper this week, but I need to share it on here.

As I’ve said, I’ve been observing at a class for fifteen days. I have nine of those days done, six more to go. On Friday, I worked with a kid named Lee*.

Lee has ADD. Why do I say that? Because my dad also has ADD and my brother problem does too. I know how those people work to a degree. He reminds me some of my brother where he hates math and school and he fights doing any real work.

This week he began to fall behind in his homework. He’d only do half of the assignments, or write a page in printing instead of cursive, or something like that. Obviously, this frustrated the teacher and obviously, he had to make it up.

So on Friday, I sat down with Lee and I began to work with him. I would force him to focus, remind him to do the simple things, like writing down the problems instead of doing it in his head, and ask him what the next step is. I figured that if he daydreams, let’s keep him focus and he’ll get through the work the faster.

While I worked with him, I discovered that he didn’t understand why we did what we did. He could not figure out often times what the bottom number on the fraction word problems was. I tried a couple different ways to teach him what it meant and why we had to chose this number, without just saying, put down 60 because it’s suppose to be the bottom number. It took me three tries. At least.

I don’t know how long it would have taken me for real because just as i think he almost got it, the teacher came over and basically told him how to do the problem. I didn’t want to tell him how to do the problem; I wanted him to see why he did the problem that way. Then he got frustrated, tense and hated the math again. (Nor did I work with him for the rest of the day. As the teacher said, I’m not going to be there to hand-hold him during the test, so he might as well get used to me not being there. I sorta agree. I wasn’t giving him answers is the problem.)

While working with him, I also discovered that he confuses multiplication and division. He would have gotten half of his fraction reduction problems wrong if I wasn’t there because he would start to reduce and then multiple instead of divide one part.

So now I feel horrible for him. He’s struggling, obviously, but I don’t know if I can or should do anything about it. I highly suspect he won’t pass the test but now there is no knowing if he doesn’t pas the test because he is too lazy to do the work or because he doesn’t understand it. Chances are, the teacher will think that he doesn’t understand it. But I also don’t feel like I can mention to the teacher that he doesn’t know this and this because I’m just the observer and not really a teacher.

i’ve been thinking about Lee all weekend and I’ve been trying not to because I realize that if I think about him too much, I’m going to get scared to go to the class again because I’ll think that I did something wrong. I want him to get the right answers but telling a child how to do the problem just because he is falling behind won’t work well either.

So maybe it’s best for me to just work with computers. At least then I don’t get emotionally invested in them and think about them all weekend.

 

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