Bobby_TP_#6

This past Monday P.J. and I worked on a test from a couple of weeks ago and some reading comprehension from a book about jellyfish. P.J. was sick that day, which worried me because last time we met he was in no mood to be studying and I felt that today would be no better. When I asked him how his trip to the zoo was last week his response of, “That’s in the past, we don’t need to talk about it,” did not portend well. I thwarted his protests over the irrelevancy of the test we were going to cover and we delved in. P.J. read well, despite being sick, and answered the reading questions adequately. I still have a sense that he does not really understand while he’s reading because, despite the higher odds of answering the questions correctly due to the already incorrect answer, he would still frequently get the questions wrong. I use the Socratic Method when trying to guide him to the correct answers, but it seems all my “why would x do y if xyz” style questions seem to confound him. I don’t want to give him the answers right out, but he doesn’t seem to have the slightest clue as to what I’m indicating when I ask him about the reading. Slogging through the essay was excruciating. Despite writing clear and simply stated evidence from the text on the board and the name of one of the articles actually being “Voting”, I could not get P.J. to realize that one of the author’s messages was that voting was a way for people’s voices to be heard. The jellyfish story went much better. The amount of text per page was about a paragraph, so he retained the information readily. I can’t blame P.J. for his relationship with reading; I had the same relationship with math when I was his age. No matter how or for how long someone tried to explain a concept to me it never made any sense whatsoever. I just need to find a way to get through to him.