Personal Narrative: My Tutoring Field Experience

Tutoring Field Experience The little girl that I tutored was named Helen. She is a Hispanic student in first grade. She is very quiet and I had a hard time getting information from her. But what she did tell me was that she lives with her mother and father and she said she had siblings but I couldn’t get a clear answer from her as to how many. From what she said, I think she has several brothers. She said that her father doesn’t stay with them all the time, so I don’t know if her parents are divorced or if he just goes away to work sometimes. A lot of the Hispanics that I know from home do tend to work in industries that require them to travel a lot. Her parents are from Mexico, her mother speaks fluent English but her father only speaks a little bit of English. She has just as good, if not better English than the rest of the children in her class, so there is no language barrier. She is bilingual so she speaks English and Spanish.
I tutored her twice over the past two Tuesdays during her recess period.
We met in her classroom so she would feel more comfortable. She is an EIP reading student so I tutored her in reading. She does go off with her EIP class everyday but her teacher said she could use some extra help, plus she is the only non-Caucasian in the class, so that is why I chose her. She can read most of the words, but I feel like she doesn’t comprehend them when she reads them. For instance, she read a sentence out loud, then I asked her what the sentence was about and she couldn’t tell me. I helped her with a AR test and she only made a 40%. Hopefully I helped her see that she needs to make sure she goes back over what she read
twice. We worked during her recess period. I felt bad that she was having to miss her play time, but she really needed help. She didn’t seem to mind missing though. She has a very sweet spirit so even though she had to miss recess, she kept a smile on her face the whole time. Going into this experience I expected her to not know very much English and because she was in EIP I didn’t expect her to be very smart. But I realized afterwards that I had completely stereotyped her. Though she was very shy and wouldn’t talk much, she spoke very good English. She was also very smart and willing to try even when she thought she couldn’t do something. I also learned more about the EIP program, and how helpful that will be one day when I have my own classroom. When I have my own classroom I will try my best not to prejudge someone based on the labels they have, like being Hispanic or in the EIP. I will try to get to know them before I make any judgments. I also learned that sometimes it can be very hard to communicate with someone who is very shy, but once you get to know them a little better they will open up and you can build an awesome relationship.