"What a difference individual attention makes"

Last week while Aaron Thompson was teaching, I decided to take one of our students down to the library to review some material. Since we are teaching one class of Spanish each day I decided to use that time to work one on one with students. It was so beneficial working with Darcel. We all had preconceptions about her being a potentially weak student with learning disabilities, however, I was surprised at how incredibly bright she was. I had her read aloud to me and answer some reading comprehension and context clue questions. She read pretty fluently, but could use some more practice. I preceeded to go through each question that Darcel got wrong. In addition, I also had her edit an autobiography she wrote. I was amazed to see that she really understood the mistakes she had make after reading over her work (I made her read it aloud!). She admitted that she doesn't read over anything that she writes. We all initially thought that Darcel was one of those students that was lazy and didn't care. Her problem is that she stays up late on the phone and doesn't really get discipline at home. I decided that our group would take turns working with students on reading and writing. So far, the first years say that it makes a tremendous difference.