Tutor Training

For the past semester I've worked as a writing tutor, and for the past year and a half, I've been a tutor in an Adult Basic Education (ABE) classroom for people seeking their GED. As a tutor working with adults of all ages, levels and backgrounds, I think I've learned more from the students than they have from me.

I've read essays about people's struggles with drug addiction, anorexia, learning a new language, having a child born prematurely, seeing a friend die from a gun shot, finding religion and of course, a challenge they all share: going back to school.

For me, going to college was never a question, it was the next phase of life after graduating from high school. The majority of my friends followed the same path. And while I knew people who didn't go to college, it was never something I contemplated much. You go to high school, you decide on a school and you go.

I knew from a young age, I would go to Colorado State University, I would go to vet school, I would become a vet, care for animals of all sizes and type and have a menagerie at home. My mother was an elementary school teacher and people always asked my sister and I if we wanted to be teachers like our mom. I always vehemently said no.

Lesson One: Learn to deal with the unexpected

I said no because I saw the long hours my mom put in, both during the school year and during her breaks. I had helped organize projects that she was working on. I had graded a few papers. I had put up decorations in the classroom, stapled the monthly calendar into place on the wall and organized and cataloged the books that she kept in her classroom library by reading level and interest. I had heard her discuss parents who were either over or under involved. I said no, because I heard exasperation in her voice as she talked about kids who were unruly and didn't do their school work. I remember disagreements with principals. I said no, because working with animals sounded a heck of a lot easier than dealing with those stresses.

And then came the change of major. Then came the failed launch of a journalism career. Soul searching ensued. I found myself in an MFA writing program trying to glean what I could teach others about writing. It was a roundabout route to what I had suspected all along: I wanted to share knowledge with people who needed it.

Lesson Two: Patience

Working with the students in ABE class, I have found a patience I didn't know I had. This patience extends beyond the rules of writing into teaching math, something I never imagined. I always thought I was horrible at math in school, but I actually understand a lot more than I ever thought I did. (Part of it is probably the amazing workbooks we have that use really good examples that are easy to understand.)

I still suck at remembering my multiplication tables, but algebra came back easily, and I'm able to figure out percentages, fractions and even long division. Not bad for a writer. One of my students is working on algebra and every week it's a struggle. It would be easy to be frustrated with her when she repeats the same mistakes week after week. And week after week I have to remind her that every reaction has an opposite reaction and we must follow that rule. As one of my coworkers has told me, I seem to have infinite patience. But it's something I have to remind myself every time I open my mouth to a student: here is a person who is still learning these rules. Everyone learns differently, at a different pace, and most importantly: I was this person once.

There are many different subjects that make sense to some of us and seem like a totally abstract concepts to the rest of us. Some subjects we may become semi-experts in, others we may ignore for the rest of our lives. But one thing people should always keep in mind: getting upset with someone for not immediately knowing everything in the universe helps no one. It doesn't help the teacher to believe that the student can't learn. It doesn't help the student to believe that they are incapable of learning. Success is your reward for being patient.

Lesson Three: Adult learners are among the most courageous

I can't imagine going back to school thirty years after I graduated from high school, can you? What about moving to a country where the majority of the citizens don't speak your language? And not only that, but you are going to school to learn this new language as well as earn a degree of some sort? I cannot even comprehend the challenge. Not only do these adult students amaze me, but the ESL students I work with astound me. It never fails that I enter a tutoring session and an ESL student says they need help with their grammar. What is so interesting to me is how well these people, who think their English skills are awful, really understand English. Definitely a lot better than I understand Chinese, Russian, Arabic or Japanese. Their eagerness to learn is infectious. Read the sentence: She say she win me next time. Suggest a modification: I think you mean, "She said she would beat me next time." A smile spreads across the face next to me: Oh, yes. She would beat me. Say a phrase and they jot it down and ask you to say it again. Smiles illuminate with recognition. Encouragement is paramount. Praise successes and be gentle with suggestions.

It's not just ESL students I find inspiration in; there is a grandmother in my ABE class that is learning to read. I love watching her finish a section of her social studies book. She sits back in her chair, lips slightly parted, a smile tugging on one side of her mouth, a look of wonder in her eyes and says, "Wow." A year ago, she was still using an audio dictionary to read many sentences; plugging in a word and listening to it be pronounced. Her kids are grown. This is her time to learn, she told me.

Lesson four: To teach is to learn

No matter what I teach my students, learning how to share my knowledge in a better way is important to me. Keeping the tutoring session a safe place to ask questions is especially imperative. Empowering students to ask questions may help the teacher teach more effectively in the future. I encourage my writing tutees to stop me if they have a question as we read through their work. Many feel since I'm the "expert" I have all the answers. I recognize that there are limitations to both my knowledge and my proofreading -- there are probably going to be things I miss or fail to explain. Questions can take you out of the moment, perhaps into something deeper.

This is probably the most important item I've learned as a tutor. There is room for growth in all of us, either as a student or a teacher. While I tell people I'm probably done with school, I don't ever believe I will stop learning. And I don't want to stop. Education, whether formal or not, is vital. Humans learn every day. If we aren't learning, we become complacent. What a boring world that would be.

Thanks for stopping by The Tendrils.

What they teach us

My dad told me this: People without kids can be a little weird, but people who don’t even have animals, they are the strangest.

We were talking about people who didn’t understand how kids and young adults act because they don’t see these interactions on a daily basis. Same with people who don’t have animals. There are so many things that these people are missing.

I grew up with various different animals in my house: anoles, bulgy-eyed fish, toads, frogs, guinea pigs, cats and a dog. I loved them all. I cried when my parents decided our dog, Bert, was too big, too much work and we gave him away. My outdoor cat, Apricat, adopted me one day while I was playing on my swing set among the apricot trees. I really wanted a pig and a tarantula, but my mom said no. I wanted to be a veterinarian at the age of five, or maybe even younger than that. Someone told me that I should go to Colorado State University because that is where they trained veterinarians. That’s the only school I planned on going to until high school when I considered going to Cornell University because they had a vet school too. I ended up at CSU, but my focus shifted to writing.

I always associated better with animals. The interactions of humans were confusing to me, especially when I started school. I had very few friends growing up, and even fewer close ones. But I knew all the dogs in the neighborhoods I passed through on my way to and from school.

My parents had two cats when I was born. I got my cat, Shushi, when I was about eight after the older cat had died. She was a tiny ball of fur, the runt of her litter, but a tough little thing. Black except for a white streak that ran from her face, down her stomach and spidering out to her paws. I loved to caress the downy, distinctly kitten fur that stuck out in different lengths and the softest part just behind her ears. She loved to curl up in my lap, the size of a stress ball. I named her after a feisty kitten in a book I read just before she came to live with us.

I’m always astounded by people who say cats have no personalities.

Shushi loved cheese and ice cream. She loved to hunt little stuffed mice toys, crying out in a terrifying yowl whenever she carried one to me on the couch. “See what a good hunter I am?” She seemed to say. “I have brought you evidence of my hunting prowess.” On cold winter days, she could be found curled up on bed in the sun or in my lap, wherever I happened to be. In the summer, she sprawled on the tiles in the bathroom or in front of one of the doors. During the school year, she waited by the door to greet me upon my arrival, meowing and rubbing up against my legs. If I was home, she was by my side.
When I went off to college, my mom says she seemed lonely, not sure where I had gone and if I would come home. I had left a sweatshirt on my bed; she covered it in fur from laying on it, perhaps drinking in my scent.

Animals feel. This is something I hear on pretty much every episode of the show Animal Cops. Animals feel pain. They feel love. They feel loss. They just have no words for us to understand.

For several years, I resisted getting another cat, even when Shushi was still alive. I got a guinea pig, Weiss, when I lived in LA, so I could have a pet, but not feel like I was replacing Shushi. Weiss’ little squeels in the morning livened the apartment. She makes sure you do not forget she is there and hungry. She coos when she eats her carrots and peppers. Her eyes close in pleasure when you rub her nose.

My dad called me when I was about to board a plane back to Colorado to tell me Shushi was gone. Three years later, it’s still strange to go home and see only my sister’s cat, who is getting old herself.

A friend of mine and her mom recently lost both of their cats. Before it happened, the older cat had not been doing well. We were talking about the possibility of having to put the cat to sleep and I said, while it is sad, it’s good that she can be there and say goodbye, the chance I didn’t have. We owe it to our pets to keep them from pain. She said when she got the cat all those years ago, she didn’t think it all the way through, that eventually she would have to say goodbye to her furry friend.

My husband loves animals as much as I do. And still, I resisted getting another pet. We live in a small apartment. He has allergies. I refuse to have a dog with no yard to run in. I want our animals to have space. But really, the reason was I wasn’t sure if I could love another animal, another cat, that wasn’t Shushi.

A few months ago, my husband texted me a photo of a cat in the animal shelter by his work. She had a little pink nose, the pointed face and slightly crossed blue eyes of a Siamese mix. Her name was Lily and I had to have her.

Lily loves to lay in the window sill in our bedroom and soak in the late afternoon sun that pours through our sliding glass porch door. She is glad to help you finish your yogurt. When you get home, she will tell you everything that is on her mind. She wants to be near you, but not in your lap. She, like any other cat or dog I know, loves chin scratches. Her favorite toy is an orange stress ball that she found behind my desk. I’ve learned that I can’t compare her to Shushi. I have to take her for who she is, the little love bug who sleeps between us at night and purrs.

And as much as we want our pets to stay forever, we know it can’t be so. This is what they teach us, if we only pay attention: to love while there is time. To play. To live and value the little things, like a purr and a squeeze of the eyes. The satisfied look on a toad as he catches a cricket with his tongue. The joy of a lolling tongue while chasing a toy in the sun or the rain or the snow.

One Year

“I won't give up on us
Even if the skies get rough
I'm giving you all my love
I'm still looking up”

-- Jason Mraz "I Won't Give Up"


Three years plus two months ago, I met this guy. June 9th. 6/9. Luckily this easy to remember.

Some of you know this guy. Some have heard of him, some of you have even read about him.

We dated. We fell in love. We got engaged. The usual story.

And a year ago, on July 30th, we got married. So this past month, I thought a lot about what I have learned in a year of being married. I want to be able to give good advice about what to expect as a married couple, but I don’t know if I can really do that. At least not reliably. But I have, I think, learned about my own marriage.

I quote Jason Mraz here because the first time I watched a lyric video for this song, I was in the tune -- this was my life expressed in music. Many songs are partially great because so many people can connect with them. Just another reason I love music.

I’m a wannabe rock star. I love to sing. I love to sing in cars, as my dear husband will attest to, and sing while cleaning or taking a bath. I want to play guitar and write songs and sing. But I don’t have that specific set of skills. I played flute from fifth grade through college and even wrote some music for the flute. I learned piano, but pretty much all I can play well these days are chords; I am not going to be the next Jamie Cullum. I know one chord on guitar. So luckily for me, there are tons of musicians writing songs for me to sing instead.

For part of my graduating MFA masterpiece, ahem, manuscript, there is an essay I call “Playlist.” I wrote it in part as a my own version of a love song. For a year, while we were still dating, my husband lived three and a half hours away in a small town. We split weekends every month and drove to see each other, sometimes through snow or blinding rain over several Colorado mountain passes. We spent hours on instant messenger if we weren’t on the phone. I compiled a two cd set of songs that made me think of him. It was intended as a gift for him, but for some reason, my car could play the cds and his could not. And so the gift became my own. Many songs that spoke to me on that ooey gooey level that I quite honestly did not think I had.

When he moved back to Denver, we were engaged and I thought, oh, this will be easy now. I don’t have to wait a whole week to see him anymore. I can go home from work and there he will be.

And this joy lasted about a month. I started wanting space and freedom from boxes of stuff that we had little room for in our one bedroom apartment. And pop cans to be picked up. (This is still a point of aggravation in my life.) And there was also the wedding planning. And the full-time working for me and job searching for him. And the being in the final year of my MFA program.

This is lesson one: Do not believe that you can work full-time, go to school full-time and plan a wedding. It may sound doable. How hard is it to plan a wedding, right? Wrong. If you do agree to this insanity, be prepared for crying. Lots of crying.

So the wedding happened and a year later, we have survived.


“When I look into your eyes. It's like watching the night sky. Or a beautiful sunrise. There's so much they hold.”

--- Jason Mraz “I Won’t Give Up”


Of course, no one told me this until I was already married, but the first year is apparently the hardest. The first six months we were married, I spent a lot of time at my computer or my nose stuck in a book, trying desperately to finish my manuscript and make something of the essays I had written the previous year and a half. I was also cranking out about ten more essays to finalize a collection. I was working too, and just feeling stressed about everything.

Nightmares about being late to work or being fired. Living nightmares about having a husband who had no job. Agonizing thoughts about what it would be like to have to move back in with our parents. It’s not something I would wish on anyone. I stewed on this. I felt a crushing weight on my chest at night, so heavy that I sometimes I wanted it to squish me so I wouldn’t have to feel it anymore.

I liken this to a sort of depression.

It’s that feeling where you are not where you expected to be at this point in your life -- it makes you ache. You want to be the movie star, commanding all the money that, presumably, the big movie star makes. But instead, you are still the Girl in the Mob. Your friends have to rewind and pause and rewind again and play in slow-mo just to see you.

“And just like them old stars, I see that you've come so far. To be right where you are. How old is your soul?”

-- Jason Mraz

I feel like I’m still waiting in the background, too. I want so badly for my life to move forward. I want to be speaking to the crowd instead of hiding in it. Or rather, I want to be writing to this crowd.

But at points, I have to listen to everyone who tells me to be patient. And many people tell me this, but I do not always have the imagination to see past today or this week, where I see myself in the same place. I can only think about how everything in my life will remain the same: my current job, his current unemployment, both of our frustrations with our own status quos.

And yet, this is what I have had to really learn: I must be patient, if only because I can do little to control the powers that be. I cannot give myself a new job, just like I cannot bestow a new job on my husband. I must surrender the control I want to have and practice being patient.

I am thankful that my husband seems to have infinite patience, mostly with me. I feel like it is a big deal to not nag (as much as I used to) about glasses and pop cans left all over the apartment. Then, there is my husband, who has to deal with my fits. He gives me space. He tries to tell me things I don’t want to hear when I need to hear them. He loves me. He stays.



“We had to learn how to bend without the world caving in. I had to learn what I've got, and what I'm not and who I am.”

-- Jason Mraz


I think we have learned a lot about each other. One thing I really wanted to know on our anniversary was what he had learned after a year of marriage. I told him that I had learned to not nag as much about the pop cans he leaves around (though I will admit that these occurrences have lessened) and all the other things that bug me. What did he learn? He has learned to pay more attention to the picking up of said pop cans and generally keeping the place clean.

What I think we really have learned is to try and make the other not feel like shit. This is an important lesson to have learned.

Sure, we will still both feel like shit some of the time, but improvement comes about by someone wanting to feel less shitty about life or about themselves. Someone choosing a different path.

In the end, I feel exactly like Jason Mraz in this song. Life does suck once in a while. It will probably always suck once in a while. But having someone that loves you on your side makes life suck a little less, be it friend, family or lover. Having my husband in my life does make life better.

Knowing I have been a grumpy wife for much of the last year, I wanted to give a gift with meaning. As a writer, I know words have meaning. And for a first anniversary, the traditional gift is paper. I typed up why I love my husband, cut them up and put them in a glass jar labeled “Love Jar: Reasons Why.” I hope that every time I say something out of anger or annoyance, he will think of one or several of the reasons that sit folded up in the jar.

Love and patience will get many couples through their first year. Both got us through ours. And I think both of us are stronger for it.

Books for your baby

Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play.  

-- Henri Matisse

Do you remember the first book you read? What do you remember about it? Why did you like it?

If you could recommend only one book to new parents, what would you choose?

I have a friend who is about to become a mother. We have known each other since we were in elementary school and grew up singing in the church choir together. I have several friends who are now parents, but no one that I have known since we were young children ourselves. Instead of a card for her baby shower, the hosts asked that we bring a book for the baby.

This is where my dilemma lies. How do I choose just one?

I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells.  Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope.  Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities.  

-- Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss)

My parents read to me nearly every night in my waterbed, sometimes one or the other drifted off mid-story only to have me shake them awake again. “You haven’t finished the story,” I would tell that night’s reader. “You were snoring.”

First come the picture books. I had a ton of Dr. Seuss books, of course. Cat in the Hat. Green Eggs and Ham. Horton. Yertle. I think I’ve read them all.

I recall my favorite being “And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street.” I loved the illustrations, as the adventure grew from a man and a tired horse drawing a cart to a zebra and a chariot, racing down Mulberry Street.

I walked to and from school for much of my childhood, much like the child in the book. Middle school was a forty minute walk one way; high school twenty-five. Middle school was in a quiet neighborhood. I passed many old houses, cars parked on the side of the streets, usually with my cd player blasting music in my ears. I loved the houses that looked like converted barns and the painted ladies. Some streets had more than others. I knew the dogs on my route, too, some of them by name if I was able to read their tags. I was always on the look for things out of the ordinary, but these experiences were rare.

It was high school in downtown that offered daily changes, for at least half the walk anyway. And here, I remembered “Mulberry Street.” The diversity of what I saw every day elongated my imagination. There were new drivers everywhere. Kids in junky cars and fancy alike. I rode my bike. But I liked to imagine sometimes that my bike turned into a fashionable scooter, painted in tangerine stripes. Wouldn’t that be grand? Or a motorcycle like my dad’s, a BMW. Or maybe I was stylin’ in a candy red sports car, taking my friends for a cruise to one of the drive-thrus right by school.

There are other books I remember too. The first book I read by myself -- “Blueberries for Sal,” by Robert McCloskey (he also wrote “Make Way for Ducklings” and “Homer Price”). It was in the library of my kindergarten classroom. I confess, I didn’t remember the name of book, but I remembered the story. A girl and her mother go hunting blueberries. As I paged through the book via Amazon, the memory of sitting in my kindergarten classroom, squatting on the floor, flashed in my head. I remember loving the drawings in the book first and then beginning to piece the words into sentences. I wanted to go hunting for blueberries too.

In our classroom, there was an art section, a library section and a playhouse section, set up like a kitchen. Some days, I was the dog, but on a few occasions, I was Sal, hunting for blueberries in the forest. And I’m sure on a few days I was Sal the dog, hunting for blueberries.
 

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
― Albert Einstein

Imagination, departure to another world, it builds a child to live in a world in which we need to be flexible. To roll with the punches life throws. Find a solution to a plaguing problem. And often times, books serve as an escape, or to educate about the unknown.

Another of my favorites is “Ferdinand the Bull”, by Munro Leaf, about a baby bull who liked to spend his days calmly smelling the flowers. The illustrations are drawn in a striking display of white and black. The setting is Spain, a country famous for bull fights. (There is also a cartoon: Ferdinand the Bull -- Walt Disney)

I like the sentiment of a male bull, expected to fight and act fierce, but all this boy wants to do is take in the beauty around him on the farm. People and other cows alike expect Ferdinand to be a fierce, spitting, ferocious bull, but he isn’t. His mother is concerned, but in the end, she just wants him to be happy -- to be Ferdinand.

Stories that challenge stereotypes, like Ferdinand, have immense power for young children. I like to think they did for me. As a child, I wanted to play with my dump truck and bury my Barbies in my sandbox, narrating their horrified noises as the sand closed in on them. I wanted to wear baseball caps, skate on a borrowed board and race my bike down the street. I’m sure my mom would have prefered I played dress up in clothes that were pretty and sparkly instead of the overalls and fake beard I favored. But just like Ferdinand’s mother, she and my dad let me be who I was.

I’m not a parent, but I was a child once. Through the books that my parents and I read together, I grew to know worlds beyond my own. I learned to use my imagination. I learned to love literature. I hope that my friend’s child grows to learn to not to be afraid to be herself and to live many lives through the books she will explore, reading some of them until they fall apart. Most of all, I hope she learns to like the books I give her the most. I am a writer after all.

The Seed

Welcome to Untangled Tendrils.

Today, the first day of summer, and I'm sitting on my porch to write this first post. I have some plants growing next to me.  A light breeze brushes the leaves of the tomatoes and peppers as they soak up the sun.

I don't know about you, but when I think of summer, I see gardens in bloom and growth. Spring is when you plant the seed, but summer is when the seed takes root and life really begins. Growing up, my parents always had a garden. My mom raised the flowers, my dad the food plants. When I was born, we lived in a yellow and white house on the west side of Colorado Springs, nestled up against Manitou Springs at the base of Pikes Peak. We had a small greenhouse and a garden area behind a wooden fence, dividing it from the grassy backyard that housed my play set and sandbox.

My dad said I liked to lay in the shade of the pumpkin leaves, earning my pet name, Pumpkin. I remember the sweet and sour, earthy smell of the dirt -- this is still my favorite part of a garden. The earth is where it all begins -- the seed sprouts, seemingly insignificant little leaves start to emerge.  I loved poking my finger into the moist soil, dropping the seed in the hole and covering it lightly, a secret buried.

We always had peas and tomatoes. Beets. Squash. Towering sunflowers. Zucchini. Rhubarb (a contribution of Mom's). Our garden plot followed us when we moved across town when I was three. It is well planted again this year, thanks to Dad and my sister, who is back living at home following her college career.

I think my dad gets his growing genes from his mother, my grandmother Irene. I don't remember much about her gardens in Illinois from visits I made when I was younger, but I do remember the raspberry forest. My grandmother made the most mouth-watering pies. The crust by itself was a joy, but what made the pie was the filling. Grandma would send my cousins, sister and I out to the backyard with buckets or bowls to fill with the delectable red berries. Our red fingers and tongues as evidence, we ate roughly half of the berries we collected. One could disappear into the raspberry bushes -- they towered above as we plucked, standing at least five and a half feet tall. Sometimes, the thorns would catch on our hands, but the pie we ate later was worth the prick. Grandma lives in a retirement home now and I don't know if the raspberry bushes still stand at the old house, but when I think of pie, gardens or summer, I remember those humid, hot days spent harvesting berries in the spring of my life, the beginning.

It's the summer of my life now, the time to grow and develop into an adult, one half of a couple, I know things will grow and things will die. New opportunities will arise. My life will change and maybe go down a new path. My husband and I are both looking for our next job, the next step to a house, to having my own garden, like the one I remember from childhood.

Last year my porch plants yielded one pinky-toe sized pepper and several failed tomato flowers. I bought some onions, parsley (because I thought it was cilantro and didn't see the label until I got home), tomatoes and sliced up my tiny pepper to make salsa. Sure, the only thing I gained was the pepper, but I have to say that one tiny thing is what gave the salsa its spice.

As I water my tiny porch garden, I dream of the garden I one day hope to have, but for now, this will do. Tomatoes, basil, sweet peppers, thyme, hot peppers and at last count, three carrots that have suffered through. As summer grows to fall, I hope my plants continue to fruition, and my dreams too.


Thanks for stopping by the Tendrils.

-Stephanie