Getting The 2nd Student Going

Next week I'll be starting up with my second Math tutoring pupil. She's just finishing up Grade 5 right now, and her parents want her to get a head start on Grade 6 over the summer (poor kid!). I don't know her final Grade 5 Math mark yet (the report cards come out sometime next week) but I got the impression that it will be somewhere in the mid-70s.

For my first session with her, I've been making up a list of sample questions to ask her, based on the Grade 5 curriculum for Math in Ontario. I'm hoping that these will allow me to get a good sense of what she did - and didn't - understand about what was taught in Math this past year. Depending on how that goes, I'll either launch into some Grade 6 material in the following session or else review the appropriate Grade 5 topics first.

I've got a potential 3rd student in the offing, as well, although this one isn't for Math. A friend of Vicki's has a Grade 4 student who does fairly well at Math but is really struggling with writing and reading comprehension. I had initially sidestepped this request (a couple months ago) because it's so far outside of what I'm comfortable tutoring (i.e. Math!) but the friend has persisted, and so I've started talking to her about it. Clearly, if this actually comes together, it's going to be a very different challenge than what I've been dealing with in tutoring Math. One of my areas of concern is that, whereas Math is very black and white in terms of what's right and what's wrong, anything to do with writing - or English in general - tends to be more subjective. I suppose, though, at the grade school level, that's less of a problem, as the focus is more on straightforward structural matters, like being able to spell and punctuate correctly, form correct grammar, and so on. It's probably not until high school that you get into the whole messy analysis of imagery and all that other stuff that teachers love to take marks off for! So maybe it wouldn't be that bad...

Anyway, if I can keep growing my pupil list like this, I may not need to take on any other kind of work. And wouldn't that be nice?