Mr. Reingold's Room

I spent my first day tutoring kids from 2nd through 5th grade. There are several of us tutor/teachers at the office on Saturdays. The office has after school tutoring times as well; I'm only working there on Saturdays. It's interesting to see each kid's strengths and weaknesses in Math and English. I think I noticed most kids are good in one but not the other. Some fun memories are from a fifth grade boy. He is hyperactive and inattentive at times, though I'm not diagnosing him as ADHD, as I'm not qualified to do that. He is strong in math and can barely keep his eyes on text when he is reading English. He looked at the tie I was wearing and asked, "Are you the president?" I asked if it was because of the tie, and he said yes. I told him I don't want to be president, and the discussion went back to the lesson. The director helped me on my first day, observing and leading the lesson at times. She asked him what he knew of punctuation. He said he didn...

For the last year or so, I've been saying, "I'm going to be a teacher when I grow up." Now I realize I can say I am a teacher. I tutored two ninth graders in the winter and spring. I tutored several middle school students this spring, helping them prepare for the SHSAT high school entrance exam in New York City. Now I'm doing two more things. I recently began tutoring a man I will call CI. He is 18 years old, and he has autism and several various challenges in preparing him for the world. I'm also about to begin teaching a handful of students to help them catch up in their regular school studies. My work with CI is largely teaching him life skills. There are so many social skills that we expect everyone to have, because we tend to pick them up as we go along, but we can't take them for granted with autistic people. My work with the younger students will be to bring them up to speed in Math and English. The work will be at a small tutoring center in Chinato...