As I mentioned in my intro I will create pseudonyms for all characters to keep this space anonymous. And as the majority of the children I tutor seem to have been named by the “random” wikipedia function I will follow suit.
So, where were we? After two hours of SAT tutoring I was switched over into munchkinland. I was teaching a six year old girl. She was to read aloud from her workbook, discuss the picture with me and answer a few questions. After one story about a pizza shop we were discussing the picture: a 70’s-ish black and white line drawing with some red highlights. I listened and occasionally offered words of encouragement as she pointed with her teeny finger and explained what was happening in the picture using the context of the story. “That’s the man, and that’s the woman. That’s the pepperoni pizza. There’s the restaurant and the sign and that’s the pepperoni bush.”
She was right. The bushy shrub in front of the restaurant was covered with red smudges that looked just like the red smudges on the pizza. I was about to explain that it wasn’t actually a pepperoni bush but then I imagined getting suckered into explaining where pepperoni actually comes from and then explaining to her parents why their first grader had become a vegan. So I went with: “Precisely, Cleopatra. That’s the pepperoni bush. Excellent deductive reasoning! Here, have a dolphin sticker.”
And then we read stories about jellyfish and peanut butter and hot air balloons. In the one story we even flew to the moon! Which, as it turns out, is not made of cheese. Because cheese comes from cheese trees, clearly.
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