Wrapping up

This was the last week of mentoring for me and my student. Working with him through to improve his writing process these last few weeks has been an instructive process and has given me a great deal of insight into the challenges and benefits of working with middle school students. With my student having been sick last week, I was expecting him to have made some solid progress on some of his written pieces. Unfortunately, this was not the case, and instead I was given a crash course in some of the challenges posed by technology in today's classroom.

My student's paper was almost unmodified from the last time we worked on it, which posed an obvious problem for where we were to go from there. What was more challenging, however, was his motivation in class, which today I could not find a way to productively engage in the process of thinking about his writing. He wanted to use a laptop he had procured in order to go through another of his papers electronically, even though the piece of writing which he had printed for me was right at hand. We had a lot of room for improvement, and countless lessons on style and argumentation with that one and a half page in hand, and yet he could not focus his attention on the task at hand but instead dedicated 80% of his attention to getting his laptop power and figuring out a keyboard issue on it (that wouldn't be resolved all period long).

With this being our last class together, I found myself frustrated to not be able to shift his attention away from the problem we could not fix (the computer) and toward the problem that we had easily addressable and at hand. Having worked with another student last week, I also knew the distance between my regular student and last week's in terms of their ability and proficiency as writers. I knew that my regular student had so much work to do to refine his thinking and practice as a writer, and had this one last class (of 4) with him to produce change.

Of course, with so little time, and so few classes, is hardly possible to produce tangible change in a student's writing. Trying my best to engage with his writing with him in a productive, constructive process that was both critical and supportive was likely the best I could hope for. That he trusted me enough to show me three of four of his pieces over the weeks, and that we got to debate the best star trek captains as well, is enough for me to leave this experience glad to have been a part of it. From speaking with ATs and others, and increasingly from my own experience, I am beginning to understand just how much teaching is about the journey and not necessarily the end results.