Learning to Teach

Posted on June 14, 2005 in Tutoring

It’s about time I got around to telling about my training as a reading tutor.

When I attended the orientation last week, the coordinator told us that before she’d got her job, she’d been just a volunteer like us. On Saturday, she unfolded her full story: she had a Ph.d in Speech Communication. OK, I thought, so much for the “like us”.

A roomful of retired school teachers, young idealists, middle aged idealists, and a couple of know-it-alls who didn’t think they had anything to learn about tutoring. Our places had been assigned for us, apparently by geography because my table mates all came from the same corner of the county. I was both the noisiest and the quietest of the three, quick to make wisecracks and slow to make small talk as is my trademark among those I don’t know.

The workshop actually opened my eyes to quite a few things. Some of the exercises were intended to give us a sense of what it might be like to be illiterate. We were given pages of gibberish and were taught a few words in Shona, a South African language. I was struck time and again by the compassion that the staff of the literacy program here in Orange felt for all types of people, ranging from the kid who never got to have a decent schooling to the professor from Azerbaijan who needed to speak and read English if he was to have a job in his line of work here in the USA. The program’s broad outreach pleased me: they went into jails as well as schools. (The coordinator joked that you could always count on the guys in jail to show up for their appointment.)

Some parts weren’t new to me, such as “active listening”. Even there the exercise revealed the thinking and fears of those who come to read. Patience was the aim of this; encouraging the learners not to give up when they lost a book or forgot to do an assignment.

There exist some in this country and around the world who depend on an illiterate workforce. If the illiterate read what the powerful read, they would certainly be shocked. One does not need to specifically indoctrinate then: give them the knowledge of the signs and they will do the rest.

Woof! Woof!