Patience is a virtue!

As each session progresses, I see more and more ways that I could help my student understand his readings better.  He can almost understand the concepts but just seems to need a little more time and prompting.  I think that a part of the reason he is doing better in these latest readings is that the concepts are a little more familiar to him (toys and birthday parties).  I don't think that he knows that he can rely more on his prior knowledge or that it is a resource that he can tap on as he thinks about the readings.  I didn't want to "contaminate" his assessment results the first time around, but I do want to make it clearer to him that his existing schema is invaluable!  We're making great progress, but we'll see if I'll have enough data to go on as we wrap up our clinic assessments.

(taken from http://www.offthemarkcartoons.com/cartoons/1994-11-09.gif)

I think that as my impatience to show him more strategies to help him do better, I should keep in mind this quote by Liberty Hyde Bailey, "A garden requires patient labor and attention.  Plants do not grow merely to satisfy ambitions or to fulfill good intentions.  They thrive because someone expended effort on them" (http://wiredthoughts.com/blog/2010/05/14/patience-quotes/).  The time and effort we put in now will help give us a more solid direction when we get to work more concretely with our students next semester.     And our case reports won't get done if we don't put in the necessary work now to gather all the data we can. We'll get there sooner than we think!  Go, Team MAGEC!