Overall Good Day

Today was overall pleasant. I worked with Yosuke for one hour and then with his mother for the second hour. I don't usually tutor Mrs. Kikugawa, but when I went to her house today she asked if I would spend an hour with her because she was behind in her ESL class.

Yosuke was alright today, but I had this one really frustrating moment.

We were working on a geometry word problem and I couldn't get him to just concentrate on reading the problem to set it up properly. The problem involved a rectangle, and one of the dimensions was 9cm and the other you had to find by setting up a proportion with a similar rectangle that was 2cmx3cm.

Now, if you were careless, you might glance at the problem and say the 9cm is the long side of the rectangle, so the other side is 6cm. That's what Yosuke did, which I was expecting, so I asked him why he made the long side of the rectangle 9cm. He immediately changed his work so that the short side was 9cm. No, that wasn't good enough - I wanted him to read the problem and find for himself where it tells you which side is which. It was stated fairly clearly (the exact phrase was "9cm on the shorter side" and I know he can understand that). So I asked him this time why he made the shorter side 9cm. He pointed out that the problem asks at the bottom for the student to "find the length of the longer side." That's an okay response, but it's not good enough. It could just as easily as said "find the unknown side," so he needed to be able to figure it out without relying on that guess. He just kept repeating that answer, even though I told him to read the problem slowly and carefully. He just refused to read it! The word problem was only about 3 sentences long.

Finally, after pressing him for a suitable answer, he found the part where it said "on the shorter side" and I accepted it and we moved on. Please, Yosuke, next time when I ask you to read something carefully, just do it and get it over with!

Whew, sorry about the rant. I should add here that even though it was frustrating for me, I don't convey my frustration to the kid I'm working with. I'm actually very patient. But that doesn't stop me from ranting when it's all over!

Otherwise our session was not frustrating, and working with Mrs. Kikugawa was actually pretty fun.