Another Student - Satvik

Satvik was the first of my tutoring students - we meet three days every week for a half hour. He is in the fourth grade and loves cars. He is also very good at math...like, really good at math. So, I help him with his English. Because Satvik comes from a family that recently immigrated here from India, he speaks another language at home and has a strong Indian accent. He is very silly and likes to talk - so much so that for the first month or two, I could not get him to stop talking during our lessons so, often we would not get through, or even get to, our lessons in their entirety. Instead, he would take me on tours around his house and introduce me to his family, or show me games that he plays online.

... I can't believe I still have this job... haha...

For a while I kind of thought he was THE Demon Child from hell, but then he calmed down a bit and it turns out that Satvik is actually a very good student! He struggles more with English during the summer months when he is away from school and English speakers who he can talk to and listen to every day, all day. Today was his first day back to school and we had a VERY productive lesson. Yay for speaking English all day!

Satvik is one of the seven boys I teach. These boys are all really good at math - All of them. So, they are really great at remembering definitions and formats for papers, and anything that has a set of rules to follow...but Inferences? Extrapolation? Creative writing? Imagination? They struggle with, big time! When they, and especially Satvik, write sentences they will have all of the right components of a sentence, but somehow they still manage to place everything together awkwardly which still makes for grammatically incorrect sentences left and right. It's always hard to explain the rules of why their sentences are wrong, though, because technically they haven't done anything that is against the rules that they have learned. And the real explanations are long, complicated and drawn out...Let's just say that I have my work cut-out for me.

Anyhow, Satvik is a gem :D We bicker a lot because he is always so sure that he is right about everything. I have never felt like arguing with kids is a good idea, but in this case, I make exceptions... regularly!

Something that Satvik introduced me to is Storyline Online, where I have been pulling all of my stories from. This is the first story he shared with me: