It’s proving to be far more difficult than I thought. To M, I’m not someone to be feared, revered, or inspired from. To her, I’m just an annoying gnat to be pushed away for the 54 min period that we have together. That’s why I’ve resorted to going to her house, meeting her foster grandmother, and anchoring M at a table to finish her essay.
So she turns in this essay that it took all the cajoling to do and what happens with the very next essay? Yup. She freaking doesn’t do it again. But, I tell myself, that’s to be expected. Did I expect one tutoring experience to undo previous years’ accumulation of bad habits? So I put on a brave face and try again. This time, I’m following to her after-school tutoring at our school, sitting right next to her, and literally stabbing her with my red pen (accidentally) because we’re so close together. Amidst such loveable declarations consisting of “I could tell you put make up all over your face” and “Your eyes get REALLY tiny when you laugh” I make sure she finishes all her missing work.
And throughout the session I get a small, rare glimpse into her life. We chat about thanksgiving at her home and she shares that its her birthday during Thanksgiving break, which she’ll spend doing nothing like all her days, duh Ms. Won. As she talks I notice the word “stupid” marked on her arm and I don’t know if it’s a statement to the world or to herself. The bell rings and as she trudges away, a smidget brighter than when tutoring started, I wonder how it would feel like to be her. To walk home alone, an hour later than most other kids because she spent the whole school day doing nothing and have a mountain of work to make up. To come to school the very next day and to do the same thing over again, marking something new on her arm, which may have a duplicitous meaning or not. And it makes me strangely love her foreign, angry, antisocial ways.
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