Tuesday March 25 (recovery)

30 minutes easy in the evening. I met a new tutoring student today, which is exciting for a couple of reasons. One is that her parents are insane (that is, asian) and want her to work with me six hours a week because she got a B on her last report card (she's in seventh grade). That means I can pay my rent now. The other is that they want me to work on English as well as math. Her father asked me to bring a reading assignment for her, and to work on her writing ability. I haven't done this before, and it's a kind of wide-open new territory. I desperately cast about my room for fifteen minutes today trying to find something that would be appropriate to a seventh-grader. Lots of my books are science or math. Then I have a bunch of science fiction, which while entertaining, probably would not go over well with her father. Any sort of full-length novel is a bad idea because we would be reading it forever. Also, seventh graders have a pretty wide range of reading abilities, and I didn't even know yet whether this girl is a native English speaker (I now assume she is; her parents aren't).
I went through everything I had - too technically difficult, too thematically complicated, to mature worldview, too boring, inappropriate content (I actually picked up Lolita for a second). Finally I found an anthology of short stories I had used for a writing class at Caltech. It meant I wouldn't even have to come up with exercises for her to write - they were already in the book! Yay! So I turned to my favorite story in the book, After I Was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned.
This afternoon we did almost 70 straight minutes of "circles", then took a break. I got out the story and asked her to read the first page to me so I could hear what level she was at. After a minute she suddenly stopped midsentence. I looked over, and the sentence was, "I'm a fast fast dog and I can jump like a fucking gazelle."
Great job me. "Sorry, I forgot about that," I told her rather stupidly. "I'm a fast dog and I can jump like a friendly gazelle," I filled in for her and then we kept going. I read the next page aloud, and then gave her the homework of finishing the story and choosing any of the prompts and write the front of one page on it (I didn't actually want to assign her extra work, since I would prefer just to read the story together and talk about it, but her dad would not be satisfied with that. I'm not sure when this child is supposed to be able to sit outside and just enjoy the sun for a few minutes. She has a 97% in English class already.)
Anyway, I am glad to get a chance to think and talk about some short stories with a young student, but I could use some suggestions for stories to read with her that are age/context appropriate. My parents always censored my television and movie viewing, but never my reading, so that I read a fair amount of explicit material by seventh grade, but unfortunately that doesn't give me free reign to assign such material now.