On August 3 I observed Marco's tutoring of David Hong. David did not do the homework Marco had assigned and did not bring his book, so Marco broke out the Edgar Allen Poe. This is intensive reading for certain. Five words into "The Raven", David asked what "dreary" meant. They looked up the word, and Marco described a dreary scene so that David could make a sentence using the word. As they stopped over "ponder" and "weary", Marco would have David guess at the meaning while giving clues from the story to lead David toward the answer. After every stop Marco would reread from the beginning to keep the entire scene on track. Then he had David try to describe the scene, but David just used the books words. Marco took over describing the scene to make sure David understood what was going on. Whenever they got new information from the story, Marco would ask David if the scene they had been describing had to be changed. Since they were guessing at some details before, it was necessary to revise the imagined scene every so often. When they eventually got through the second paragraph, they went over the scene established in the first paragraph again. They ended up with 10 vocabulary words from those first two paragraphs, and there they stopped. They went over the vocabulary words again, and Marco assigned homework that David should right the definition and a sample sentence for each of those ten words.
Marco is a very no nonsense guy. He knows when David is not putting his all into this and calls him out on it. This is my main weakness, and very good for me to see in action.
Marco sounds like a great tutor and it's also really good that you got to see how Marco handled a young tutee not fully present for the session. I had one young tutee who was an excellent, polite and focused student and one who totally didn't want to participate and would really act out. I can use ideas on what to do for that sort of thing.
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