Keeping Track
Much of the funding for Literacy for Life comes from grants that require reports the activities of the organization. When you teach a class with the program, the total contact hours (# of hours times # of students in the class) are recorded through the class log-in sheets. When you tutor one-to-one, however, the program offers this portion of its website to allow tutors to document their time.
On the second page of the survey, tutors input their name and their learner’s name. On the following page, they input the number of hours they met, the amount of time they spent in preparation for the session, and where they met their learner.
I usually meet Sonia at her house, in part because getting around Williamsburg isn’t easy for her. Sometimes I pick her up and we go places – to the library, to a social services organization, or just to drive around Williamsburg. Some tutors meet their learners at a local coffee shop or another easy meeting place. When I tutored one of my other learners a few years ago – Monis from Iran – we always met at the Barnes and Noble coffee shop just a few blocks away from the William and Mary campus. We talked and laughed and drank coffee together. We were friends; she called me her “American mother” because she had not been able to see her own parents for over six years. Now she and her family are back in Iran and don’t know whether they’ll ever return to the US – our loss – so now we “meet” a few times a year on a Facebook chat.
I like the fact that our record-keeping system asks about the time tutors spend preparing for each session. That’s often hard to track; although I’m almost always thinking about what Sonia and I will be doing the next time we meet, that thinking often occurs while I’m doing something else and I take a quick minute to jot down a thought or send her a quick text about our upcoming session. I usually just record one hour of preparation for every two-hour tutoring session.
I’m writing about this process today because Sonia wasn’t feeling well and had to cancel our planned session last Friday. I think she’s sometimes exhausted from juggling the needs of her family and her own personal anxiety about what the future holds for her in America.
In my experience, after an initial euphoria learners sometimes become disenchanted with their prospects in America. They mentally – and occasionally physically – “check out” from their tutoring relationships. I don’t think this is what’s happening here; Sonia is both intelligent and thoughtful, and she knows that our sessions together will help her as she moves through the immigration process. But sometimes it can all become too much, and I know I have to let her call the shots.
I just received an email from her this morning so it’s all good.