Not sure how to word this but it happened last night. I sure wasn’t expecting this! Parent called and said the student in question was doing so well they no longer needed my services. The school (private parochial) indicated that she was able to do everything and didn’t feel she needed tutoring anymore.
I feel much differently. I feel that while she has improved, she is still struggling. I discussed some key things she has not yet learned (silent “e” and “r controlled vowels”, which I explained. Also she is still working very hard to try to figure out the words, fluency is not there, even though she has gone to struggling over consonant blends in single syllables to struggling over words with 3-5 syllables. I did try to change their minds about it.
Of course I realize that eventually you will work yourself out of a job. Maybe that is the reason the some of Orton folks around here go so darn slowly. I always wondered why they were still working on easy sounds (like /t/ and /m/) when the kid can read multisyllable words. :-)
Anyone else with this problem? Of course I do want to work myself out of a job, I mean that is the goal but how do you keep them in without having them remove the kid prematurely, just setting them up for failure later. ??
—des
This happens to me regularly. You may remember me spitting and fuming last year about the student whose family decided to cancel the tutoring sessions because he was actually being pleasant and cooperative; we were “wasting” our time doing some little experiments out of a science book, and the parents cancelled me because I wasn’t fighting him to read. I get a lot of fear of success.
There is not much you can do. One possibility that I haven’t done myself is to cal them the week after the next marking period and ask how she’s doing.