Adventures in Tutoring: Cursing Cursive
For a little less than a year, I've been helping two amazing tweenage boys become better writers and readers. I still feel like the world's worst teacher -- I don't have formal lesson plans, and sometimes we just work on homework assignments together. But the experience has offered up enough wins that I keep at it. The best day, by far, was when the three of us acted out a scene from "Much Ado About Nothing" and the kids actually GOT the humor. Their laughs and smiles played through my head as I left their house that night, and I gotta say, I had a little swagger in my step.
Obviously, I am awesome.
Another win? The fifth grader, who just wrote an essay a few weeks ago about how much he wants to be a mathematician, now wants to be a journalist. I'm not saying I'm a miracle worker, but I'm just about the only writer he knows. So...I'll take it. At the same time, I don't want to be the reason the kid ends up in a dead-end, no-promotions-on-the-horizon, no-one-takes-you-seriously, you'll-always-be-poor career. I encouraged him to keep his options open ;)
Last night, though, his older brother asked me for help with something I completely suck at: cursive writing.
Apparently they've stopped teaching handwriting in schools, and if you'd asked second-grade me about this, she'd have thrown a party. I HATED writing class. What a freaking waste of time, when I could be, say, reading. We earned a minus, check or plus in that class, and it was the only stinking thing -- besides gym -- where I couldn't break into the plus range. Not even a little-less-than-loser "check plus." I knew it was a stupid racket even at age seven.
But still I suffered through it. The tilted paper. The struggle to make my rockers right and descend just enough below the baseline for fancy lowercase letters like p. I'm sure I broke a million pencil points, struggling to write as well as I could read, while the teacher repeatedly held up Mr. Perfect Teacher's Pet as a model of what we should all aspire to.
I still hate that kid, and I don't even know what happened to him. He left in like fifth grade. I'm sure he's a great human being, but he and his perfect handwriting can kiss my ass.
I digress.
Anyway, as I aged, my writing didn't get any better. Like almost all folks, I developed my own hybrid print-cursive and that was that. I didn't think much about it until the seventh grader said "I was wondering if you can teach me cursive so I can write faster."
Turns out, the poor guy works so hard at his block print letters that he's not completing assignments in school. He can't write as quickly as he thinks, so he falls behind during in-class work. Cursive, he thinks, could solve all his problems.
Thus began an adventure for both of us.
Luckily, the internet exists, and I called up some charts of the alphabet in cursive. And you know what? Cursive looks like hieroglyphics if you haven't used it in a while. Both of us struggled through the damn thing. His capital F looked like some sort of Japanese symbol you'd have tattooed on your back after a hard night of drinking. I couldn't make a capital Z to save my life. (And believe me, I kept trying.) He didn't seem amused by my little trick of turning a capital S into a duck with an umbrella.
But still we persisted.
I noticed that he suffered from the same problem I'd had in second grade: pressing too hard on the pencil. It's like all the stress of his seventh-grade existence (which is a surprising amount of stress, actually) was channeled right into his fingers. I tried to explain how your hand just guides the pencil, it doesn't push hard or hold it in a death grip. And while he understood conceptually, he struggled and struggled. We finally tried to put some letters together to write his name, and we both sat back and surveyed his work.
"It's terrible," he said.
"It really is," replied the Worst Teacher in the World. "But the good news is that you'll get better and better as you practice. Keep writing your name, so it'll be perfect when you're famous and have to autograph things."
As I noted before, I'm not saying I'm a miracle worker, but after I'd worked with his younger brother on some reading comprehension exercises, the seventh grader ran down the steps to show me the results of his hour of practice. And you know, he got a bit better.
"DO YOUR SCIENCE HOMEWORK!" his mother admonished.
But I might have swaggered a little on my way to the car, knowing that I made some small difference.
Obviously, I am awesome.
Another win? The fifth grader, who just wrote an essay a few weeks ago about how much he wants to be a mathematician, now wants to be a journalist. I'm not saying I'm a miracle worker, but I'm just about the only writer he knows. So...I'll take it. At the same time, I don't want to be the reason the kid ends up in a dead-end, no-promotions-on-the-horizon, no-one-takes-you-seriously, you'll-always-be-poor career. I encouraged him to keep his options open ;)
Last night, though, his older brother asked me for help with something I completely suck at: cursive writing.
Apparently they've stopped teaching handwriting in schools, and if you'd asked second-grade me about this, she'd have thrown a party. I HATED writing class. What a freaking waste of time, when I could be, say, reading. We earned a minus, check or plus in that class, and it was the only stinking thing -- besides gym -- where I couldn't break into the plus range. Not even a little-less-than-loser "check plus." I knew it was a stupid racket even at age seven.
But still I suffered through it. The tilted paper. The struggle to make my rockers right and descend just enough below the baseline for fancy lowercase letters like p. I'm sure I broke a million pencil points, struggling to write as well as I could read, while the teacher repeatedly held up Mr. Perfect Teacher's Pet as a model of what we should all aspire to.
I still hate that kid, and I don't even know what happened to him. He left in like fifth grade. I'm sure he's a great human being, but he and his perfect handwriting can kiss my ass.
I digress.
Anyway, as I aged, my writing didn't get any better. Like almost all folks, I developed my own hybrid print-cursive and that was that. I didn't think much about it until the seventh grader said "I was wondering if you can teach me cursive so I can write faster."
Turns out, the poor guy works so hard at his block print letters that he's not completing assignments in school. He can't write as quickly as he thinks, so he falls behind during in-class work. Cursive, he thinks, could solve all his problems.
Thus began an adventure for both of us.
Luckily, the internet exists, and I called up some charts of the alphabet in cursive. And you know what? Cursive looks like hieroglyphics if you haven't used it in a while. Both of us struggled through the damn thing. His capital F looked like some sort of Japanese symbol you'd have tattooed on your back after a hard night of drinking. I couldn't make a capital Z to save my life. (And believe me, I kept trying.) He didn't seem amused by my little trick of turning a capital S into a duck with an umbrella.
But still we persisted.
I noticed that he suffered from the same problem I'd had in second grade: pressing too hard on the pencil. It's like all the stress of his seventh-grade existence (which is a surprising amount of stress, actually) was channeled right into his fingers. I tried to explain how your hand just guides the pencil, it doesn't push hard or hold it in a death grip. And while he understood conceptually, he struggled and struggled. We finally tried to put some letters together to write his name, and we both sat back and surveyed his work.
"It's terrible," he said.
"It really is," replied the Worst Teacher in the World. "But the good news is that you'll get better and better as you practice. Keep writing your name, so it'll be perfect when you're famous and have to autograph things."
As I noted before, I'm not saying I'm a miracle worker, but after I'd worked with his younger brother on some reading comprehension exercises, the seventh grader ran down the steps to show me the results of his hour of practice. And you know, he got a bit better.
"DO YOUR SCIENCE HOMEWORK!" his mother admonished.
But I might have swaggered a little on my way to the car, knowing that I made some small difference.
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