When I came to English class for the first time of the semester and heard about our service and what we would be doing, I was scared. I had tutored children before, but never people older than me let alone people close to my parent's age. The feeling of being scared didn't go away until the second or third time going to service. When we were sitting in the CFL the first night, I was praying that I would get a female learner because I didn't want to work with a male. It turned out that I would be tutoring a female and I was so happy.
Looking back on the first night that I met with Sonia, my learner, I am so proud of her. The first night she told me everything she wanted to learn so that she could pass the GED. To be honest I was nervous because some of the things she needed to learn, I'm not that good at such as grammer. I didn't let that stop me, I just told myself when we get to it I'll worry about it then. We have been working mainly just on math which I am grateful for because I love math. Up till now we have done adding, subtracting, multiplication, division, the order of operations, mixed numbers, and improper fractions. Some of these things she already knew and we just built off of. For two week Sonia didn't come and I was worried that she would have forgotten everything we had done, I was wrong. She came back with her homework and she got a hundred on all of it. I gave her a quiz and she didn't do too hot, but we went over it. She saw her mistakes and asked me to give her another quis. She got a 100 on this one and I was so proud. Afterwards she told me that when Mark was telling her how to do this it didn't click, but since I took it slowly and explained everything to her, she finally got it.
I never knew how big of an affect this would have on me. I never thought I would create a personal attachment to my learner because that isn't my personality. It made me so happy to hear her say this and I can't wait to go back in January and help her more and more. Sonia is truly and amazing person who has put others before herself her life. She has four children that she has put through school and even a grandchild who she is helping get through school as well. She only came to the CFL because she had stroke this past January and she knows that she cannot continue at her current job with the level of education she has completed. I know that at the end of this school year Sonia won't be ready to take the GED, but I hope that everything I have done up until then will help her along her way.
