A friend called and asked if I would take a case of math phobia. It never occurred to me to refuse. I did not think of asking for background either.
Then when the kid turned up, she was extremely nervous. My room was fairly cool actually. Yet I can see drops of sweat on her pointed delicate nose. She could not meet my eyes and seemed to be looking at a point in her lap. When I placed a work sheet in front of her, her lips started trembling. She began twisting her handkerchief. I felt like an executioner. Why did I ever move into special education without any proper training, anyway? My eyes darted around the room. Ah! There it was! I walked over to the cross stitch kit left on the small table next to the TV.
Next, I found myself chatting with Kimberly. She likes kittens. And, guess what? There was the gift wrapper I saved from Keziah's birthday present last year. We spent the dreaded hour tracing kitten shapes onto graph paper and inexpertly filling in the tiny squares with colours. When her mom turned up in the shining Camry, she could actually smile at her and asked if they could go shopping for embroidery thread.
We spent the next session outlining the cloth with a square box to contain the propose kittens' portrait. She counted out tens while I marked dots on the underside. By the time the entire area is divided into squares, I explained how the graph sheet relate to the target area on the cloth. She caught on really fast. Anyone could see Kimberly is intelligent. With weekly assignment of filling the kitten outlines with coloured crosses, we finished the project in six weeks. It was really satisfying to see her face when I praise her finished piece of work. I gently asked if she wanted to move back to the empty workbook, and she shook her head.
It's a good thing I anticipated that. Out came my shining beads of many colours and little coils of fishing line. After I explained to her about working times table into necklace and bracelets. She was really animated. As she threaded beads, I realised she has very good colour sense. By the time Mom turned up, she had created gifts for her seat mate, her cousin and a chum next door. Best of all, she could recite times table one to five.
And we went on enjoying our sessions. By the time she could relax enough to work on a revision test for her grade level, we know it is time to say good bye. Once she climbed out of her self-imposed psycological bind, she will not need any math tutor. If her school teacher did not punish students for making careless mistakes in test and if Mom did not ground the poor girl for dropping below eighty percent, she would have no need to come to me at all.
* CarolReef3DScreensaver wm from forum.esoft.in
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