Tutoring

At the beginning of July, we took Katya into the Sylvan Learning Center to have her assessed to see where she was it grade level wise. With summer upon us, I was feeling very unfocused, completely overwhelmed, and frustrated at having to suffer through Katya's horrid moods and utter lack of cooperation whenever homework or schoolwork was mentioned. I needed an out. So we shelled out the $175 to have someone else tell us what we already knew - that Katya was very far behind. If we could put Katya in the third grade, she would be at about the level of her peers and everything would be "hunky-dorey". The problem is that Katya is going into the seventh grade.

At Sylvan the message was almost like music to my ears. Their pitch is that you can drop your kid off for two hours a day, four days a week and they will educate your child without any stress on you. The kids absolutely love it, they say, because they make learning fun and give them little coupons that they can use to buy prizes (yeah - more junk!). By the end of the summer they promised that Katya would have gone up at least one grade level - maybe even two - and the thought of me not having to sit through tears while studying multiplication tables or getting raunchy looks when I correct a wrongly pronounced word sounded like heaven. And if I'd had an extra $1,600 a month laying around, I would have definately taken them up on that offer. Unfortunately, the initial nirvana of the meeting wore off and financial reality struck and so I started looking at tutors on KSL. They only charge $10 - $25 an hour, instead of $50, which was still going to be a stretch for our budget but definately more "doable". And I was going to be stress-free!

I decided to go with a lady that charged $25 an hour because she had experience with working with difficult children and she had impressed me in our initial phone conversation. Her first question was, after I had given her a background on Katya, "How well did she speak Russian because that is going to make a difference in how well she can learn English." While this was not a new concept to me, it was a clue as to how experienced this tutor was and I was sold! And I was one step closer to being stress-free!

I feel like I should change her name for "privacy purposes" (like one of those disclaimers at the end of a Law and Order episode) because I'm about to not be really nice, but let's just call her Cheryl anyway. It was after the first tutoring session that I knew I might not have hired what I thought I hired. I let her have the hour long session in privacy not wanting to lurk and actually enjoying the hour of Tony-and-me time. When they were finished, she started talking about Katya's bad past. At Cheryl's prompting, Katya had drawn a picture of something from her past that wasn't pretty. Cheryl told me all about how she had been beaten, that she didn't like the other kids in the orphanage, that she still wanted to be living with her mother, and a myriad of other details. None of the details were necessarily new to me, but I was frankly impressed that she had managed to get so much information out of her in the span of an hour. I'd been living with Katya for over a year and hadn't really gotten many more details out of her than this stranger had. Then we started talking about how she was doing in the education department. Cheryl said that Katya doesn't really want to learn (big surprise) but it seemed that she was of the opinion that we should just let Katya go at her pace and that we let Katya decide when it was time to learn. I, on the other hand, having come from Sylvan where they break down a child's "catching up" in terms of hours and having seen Katya's lack of learning motivation the entire school year (especially in the math department), wanted something a little more promising. After all, do you know how many grades there are between third and seventh?

Looking back, I wonder if this is where I went wrong. Should I have just trusted Cheryl and let her be lacksidasical (is that how you spell it - I'm too lazy to type it in Word to find out) about the tutoring hours and given her more leeway? Maybe it would have made a difference, maybe not. But what I did is opted for a more structured schedule - two hours a day, two days a week. I had a sneaky suspicion after the first session that Cheryl was very interested in playing amateur psychologist - maybe even more interested in this than actually teaching Katya. In fact, I had expressed this insight to Alex and we had agreed (mainly I had decided and Alex went along) that there could be some real benefits to Katya talking to someone else about her past and that $25 was pretty cheap for a psychologist.

I lasted about eight sessions before I'd had enough. At first Katya had liked Cheryl - she said she was "fun" - and then she no longer liked all the prodding that Cheryl did - trying to dredge out horrible details from her past. I was feeling like the money I was spending was not making good use and frankly I was actually feeling stressed about the lack of control I was having over the process. The last straw was a phone conversation I had with Cheryl to get an update on where Katya was. I didn't feel like I was "in the loop" of what was going on since I was never there when Cheryl came and I was getting Katya's progress reports from Alex - who (I love you babe!) isn't the most detail-oriented person. I needed to justify the dollars flying by and the progress report from Cheryl was scattered and inconcise and led me to conclude that I really couldn't give up control over Katya's education. I know, I know. I am a control-freak and I will admit it. I'd like to say that it makes me a good mother but I'm not sure. Anyway, Cheryl talked about how she was working on subtraction with Katya, which I was fine with since the Sylvan test had shown that she needed subtraction help. What really bothered me was that in earlier sessions she had been working on multiplication and fractions and in the phone conversation she started talking about geometry. My lack of focus had been what had driven me to go to Sylvan in the first place and now here I was with a tutor that seemed to be about as unfocused as I was! Where was my stress-freeness?

Alex offered to call and fire her. We started comparing notes and realized that neither one of us liked her "bedside manner". She was arrogant, intimidating, and a know-it-all and I didn't want to talk to her again. So Alex politely (I gave him strict instructions to be polite!) told her that we really couldn't afford her services anymore - which wasn't entirely untrue :) And where are we now? Right back where we started?

Not quite. I do have to give Cheryl credit for the following:
Katya really is almost 100% more cooperative than she was before. She will actually let you correct her mispronunciation without having a crying fit, she is for the most part pretty willing during our one hour three times a week tutoring sessions, and I do like Cheryl's suggestion of reading to Katya nightly to build vocabulary because it does give us some much needed one-on-one time.

Cheryl renewed my sense of purpose when it came to Katya and my willingness to have some empathy for what she has been through. Talking to Cheryl reminded me that I need to think more about what Katya needs and talk more about to her about how she is feeling about things. I don't know that I necessarily need to try to drag every horrible detail about her past out of her but I think it does help Katya to talk about it sometimes. Katya and I have actually had several insightful conversations post-Cheryl that have done a lot to strenghthen our relationship.

So, I have spent hours and hours figuring out my education plan for Katya, finding phonic programs and worksheets on the internet, and creating education "punch cards" and reward charts. And actually it has been working quite well. I am not stress-free, as I had hoped, but I think I have found a happy medium where I can accept my role in Katya's education. I have come to realize that Katya really does need to work on addition and subtraction - a fact that I wouldn't accept during her school year because it was so far behind sixth grade and how can we start so far back? We are reviewing all the phonic sounds despite the fact that the ESL teacher had given her stamp of approval because how can I help her if I don't know what she needs help with? Is it a bit depressing to seem to be going backwards? Yes, but as the Sylvan lady put it, "She is not going to catch up from third grade to seventh grade in one year." Her motivation was most likely more along the lines of seeing how much money she can get out of me but she really was right. Had I seen that at the beginning of this year I would have started at addition and subtraction and just think where we could be right now? Oh well - 20/20 hindsight is irrelevant. All we can do is go forward.

I am a little bit less stressed, though. I "let" Alex take over the grocery shopping and menu planning. After all, why should I get to have all the fun! Hee Hee!

Day 14 of Katya's Braces

Katya got braces on August 10th. She had mixed feelings about getting them - one day she seemed very excited about them and the next she seem very scared and anti-braces. Her X-tutor seemed to think that she only wanted them because we wanted her to get them. I don't know if that is true or not and maybe it doesn't matter.


On day one of the braces, although she was definately more brave during the process than I expected, about four hours into the braces she asked if we could go back to the orthodontist and have him take them off. I told her that unfortunately we would still have to pay the $2,000 for them anyway to which she seemed to be completely unphased. She then threatened to take them off herself. She used up a whole container of wax that day, brushed her teeth about four times and complained about them every two minutes.


Luckily, things have settled down and I haven't really heard any complaining about them for about ten days or so. I never had to have braces when I was a kid so I do not know how she feels. I can sympathize, though, and I definately felt really bad about her suffering and am very glad that she is either not as miserable as she was when she first got them on or she has gotten use to the misery. Poor girl!