Butting heads with my tutoring partner.

In class we have stopped reading our textbook and our now reading The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller and I am loving this book! What an amazing break from reading a textbook and still be able to read something informative and that I can learn from! Miller is such an inspiration and I am very tempted to read ahead in the book rather than what Dr. Garcia has assigned. However, I am not going to do that because I want to keep with the rest of the class. But it is so fun to hear her stories and experiences, and ah, she makes me want to be a teacher now! I do have to say that I really hope Dr. Garcia keeps this book to use in her future LLLS classes, because I feel it is worth it.

About tutoring though. I am having a difficult time with my tutoring partner. She is very blunt with her words and does not have a filter and it is affecting our relationship as tutoring partners. Since she has children it is difficult to call her and discuss lesson plans. And then she lives far away from me, so meeting up to discuss is not feasible either. Our other option has been email, and that has not been a breeze either. I cannot get her to respond to my emails in a timely manner. And she dismissed some of my ideas as boring, I really do not know how our relationship is going to work out. It is only the second week of tutoring and she has already made me feel terrible about myself and my ideas. This has been very stressful for me because we have not found common ground yet. For example, I had a sample lesson plan for our lesson today and she liked none of it, which is fine. Then she sent me her idea and I okayed it. Next thing I know, she wants to dress up like a drill sergeant or some military person for her lesson. I expressed my concern about her idea because we barely know our student and from what we do know I do not think he will like being interrupted and especially would not care for being “yelled” at by a military persona. Despite my hesitation, she emailed the teacher to ask for permission to do her idea, and then she proceeded to email me to say she was going to do her idea because the teacher approved of it. I was upset after receiving that email. I thought we were supposed to be a team, and she acted like we are not. On the upside she did notice she came off strongly and ended up not dressing up in military attire. Her resistance and bluntness, unfortunately has put a wedge between us. I wish our partnership had more support and kindness. I definitely feel even more like I am not supposed to be a teacher because apparently I cannot even come up with effective lesson ideas. With perseverance and hard work I know we can set aside our differences and just do what is best for our student.