One of the regular families came back to the literacy center
tonight, so I got to see Mutai again. He's 7, and just started
second grade, but he's the biggest 7-year old anyone's ever seen:
he's pushing five feet tall, and is apparently the same height as
his new teacher. I like working with him: he's got that bouncy,
scattered boy-energy that I enjoy having to work with. (Almost all
the kids I've spent time with are girls. My girlfriend's son is a
very bright geek and doesn't [yet] have the fidgeting inability to
focus that makes boys so challenging.) He has four sisters and I
think his dad works a lot, so he enjoys having an adult male
around to work with him.
The two really exciting things this time:
- I was right when I noticed him lowering his face to the
page and saying he couldn't read something because it was too
small: he's getting glasses this month.
- He got this "built a ringing bell" science kit that he's
been wanting to do with me, and we finally met up
tonight. He's totally excited about it, and read many pages of
instructions printed in a horrible hard-to-read tiny font, and
followed the directions incredibly well.
His mom is still adjusting to him, I think; being a guy, and not
his parent, and only dealing with him a couple hours a week, and
not having four other kids, I can give him a substantial amount of
focus and patience, and as part of my general approach to kids, I
don't have any ideas about what he should want or how he should be
(beyond the basics of courtesy, which he's fine with). When we
started working on the instructions, Mutai was reading while
standing up at the table, and his mom said, "Why don't you sit
down?". Which he did, but I smiled and said, "I think he's
actually okay standing up", which he was: it gave him a way to
shift his weight around and feel more active while we were
working, and he was happier that way. (He already has to sit down
in class all the time; how much can we ask the poor kid to take?)
So I have these intuitions about what might be useful, and there's
the matter of communicating those to his mother and putting them
into practice. She's great, but she's slightly younger than me and
has five kids, and there's only so much you can keep track of when
you're focused on actually running the family.
As much as this beats working, I have a meeting tomorrow about
some contract work: nothing I'm especially good at, but they don't
seem to care and I have lots of free time, so why not? Sign of the
times: we connected via Twitter postings. The weird part: they
wanted me to come in, without telling me what the work was, and
they still haven't seen my resume, nor do they have any indication
that I'm not going to show up naked and asking them to sell me
their women. Then again, maybe I'm just a warm body and they're
going to eat me. If I go missing for a week, I went
to Xtracycle in
Emeryville.
WorldTeach has received and processed all my paperwork and initial
fee, and my participation is now confirmed. We are good to go.