My most recent meeting with Jeffrey was a little less productive than usual. I'd woken up early that morning and was pretty sleep deprived, and I found out just how much energy and alertness it really takes to keep a kid that age on task. I was sort of on my back foot for the entire lesson, trying to rein Jeffrey back in from his excited speeches about Taekwondo and the Hulk. I can say that coming out of it, I now have a lot more sympathy for parents: it can be totally exhausting, trying to keep a hyper kid focused. Especially when you're perpetually running on 5 hours a night.
In between speculations on whether dogs can be polite, or which Power Ranger is actually Korean, we did manage to get some work done. I brought a couple of worksheets for us to work on, which I kind of tricked him into doing it by telling him I was in a contest where the tutor with the best and smartest student got a whole treasure chest full of candy, and that I really needed Jeffrey to finish them because I was tied for first and I really wanted to split the candy with him. He did the worksheets (long vowel sounds and basic reading comp) super fast, and I came to realize that this material, which just one month ago was totally stymieing him, was now beneath his level. I can't believe how quickly he's progressed.
From there we tried to read a book about the Power Rangers, but Jeffrey was too distracted by the pictures and I was too tired to keep him focused. So we finished maybe half of the book, and the rest the time I listened to him and joked around, and every once in a while weakly suggested that we get back to reading.
Overall this lesson wasn't my best, but at the very least it was a good learning experience. I had sort of brushed off the impact of my fatigue on my tutoring, but I quickly learned that you have to stay on your game with younger students if you want to keep things from spiraling out of control. Next time I'll come prepared, mentally and physically.
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