How the instructor found a way that worked, in helping this young girl to learn the vocabulary terms in English, by giving the child one-on-one attention that she needed, translated…
As an elementary school instructor, I’d needed to get honed up on my treasure-hunting skills; not to find anything else, but the special, unique characteristics on my students.
I’d once worked as an afterschool tutoring session instructor, Ming-Ming was a silent tiny hedgehog, always sat by the window, and, drew on his textbook, not studied. Her heightened sense of pride is apparent, any tiny fallback can, upset her too easily; she’d ignored her surrounding environment, only focused on what she thought was important, to her.
what this young girl needed was this, one-on-one attention with her instructor
Demanding her to remember a list of English vocabulary terms in one night will only make her feel more defeated. And so, I’d asked her to select only four to memorize, and encouraged her to recite the words aloud to help her remember, and shared with her the benefits, the gains to her if she were “good in English”, I was mild-mannered, and genuine when I asked her to. The following week, as I’d entered into the classroom, Ming-Ming was already flipped to the lesson of her English textbooks, shyly, she’d sat by the window, in her seat. I’d, immediately caught her drift, without any loud praises of her, only walked over to her, rolled up the page with the English vocabulary I gave to her from before, for her to recite the terms I’d given to her from before.
As she wrote one word out, a firework was going off in my mind, out of the twenty terms, she only got two wrong! At this moment, I’d known, that she’d, taken, a huge, step.
The treasure hunt in this classroom was, very short, but, that light slowly, shone through Ming-Ming, and, as her instructor, I was, very moved.
And so, this still just showed, how children CAN learn, sometimes, you just need to take the time, to understand H-O-W each children learned differently, but, unfortunately, in the bigger classes of one instructor to twenty-plus students, there’s NO time for these, independent one-on-one sessions, which is where these extra help sessions of afterschool comes in, where the students can receive the independent attention from the school instructors that they needed, to catch up to the rest of the classes, and even, get ahead too!
Life, the Obstacle Course 