Coby's Response to Chapter 10

In chapter ten of her book, Taberski talks about teaching reading one-on-one. She talks about the benefits that one-on-one teaching has and gives the reader a view of how she opperates these sessions.

What I found interesting was Taberski's statement that children who are acquiring reading skills generally don't know how to get help. They are not aware that text "should make sense, sound right, and match letters" and to cope with their misunderstanding some of them decide to mask their problems. As long as the problem stays masked a solution is hard to come by. I see this with one of the students in my mentor classroom. He has a hard time reading and writing so when it is time for either activity he plays around and makes trouble to other students so that his mind gets taken off of his work. Furthermore working with him one-on-one can be very frustrating because it is hard to get him to pay attention and do the activity. Whenever I tell him to read or write something his famous words are, "I cannot." The thing that discourages me is when he finishes I tell him, "See you can do it." Then the next day he acts like nothing happened the day before.

Taberski says that during her one-on-one sessions she "reacquaints" the student with concepts that were covered in large and small group sessions. That's pretty cool and in a way it is the same as tutoring in school during classtime. On one hand that is a nice way for me to look at it because I have working experience as a tutor and on the other hand it is profound because if all teachers taught like that I would not have a job to go back to during the summer.