Chris and Mose read and
discuss Gentlemen Prefer Blonds
Chris grew up in and around Boston. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and received a Bachelor’s Degree from the Wharton School of Business. Like many young people just graduating from college, he took a bit of a right turn, not following a path in business, but concentrating on his passionate commitment to education. Coincidently, he also discovered a passion for the West Coast, taking another right turn and moving to San Francisco where he began work as a freelance tutor for school-age children. He soon realized that there were many families who could not afford paid tutors so he made a commitment that for every five paying students, he would help one child with no charge to the family.
Chris recalls that his first exposure to the program was seeing the Project Read outreach van driving through his neighborhood. He soon realized that tutoring at Project Read would be a perfect complement to the work he was already doing with school-age children.
Chris completed tutor training in July of 2004. Originally he thought that he wanted to work with a learner who was also a parent. At that time, there were no learners waiting who had children in the home so instead, he was matched with Mose, a retired African-American man a few years older than Chris. As Chris says, "At first I was very nervous because I had never tutored an adult before, not to mention someone who was older." Even though he felt well-prepared, thanks to his tutor training and the specific information about Mose which he received from the Project Read staff, he was still wondering where he would start as their sessions began.
Since Mose was a beginning reader, Chris decided to begin working with the Language Experience Technique. This turned out to be an excellent approach for Mose because as Chris says, "He had a lot of stories to tell, and he felt honored that someone was actually interested in hearing them and writing down all he had to say. "Mose showed great motivation and began coming into the computer lab on his own, in between tutoring sessions, to work on his skills. Chris says, "He obviously wanted to be here, unlike the way kids sometimes feel about school."
After a period of working with Language Experience stories, flash cards, and some workbooks, Chris and Mose were looking for something different that would bring a new spark to their sessions. Mose decided that he really wanted to begin reading entire books. He and Chris paid a visit to the Project Read collection and chose one of the small novellas written at an easy-to-read level. Now, Chris and Mose began to dive right into these books at each tutoring session. Mose would locate difficult words in the story and they would work on them together, breaking them down, discussing meanings, and building basic vocabulary and word recognition skills. Chris says that Mose does not always pick easy books. "He likes to challenge himself," says Chris. They recently began reading a version of Gentleman Prefer Blonds which contains some very difficult words, but Chris reports that they still manage to get through two chapters each week.
Chris really enjoys spending time with Mose, and like many Project Read tutors, he believes that he has learned a lot from the process of being his tutor. For one thing, Mose has given Chris a better understanding of his community. Chris was relatively new to San Francisco when he met Mose, who as a long-time resident, was able to fill him in on local history going all the way back to the 1960’s.
Chris is very thankful that he has gotten to know Mose over the past two years. As he says, "If I hadn’t been matched with him as a tutor, I might not have had the opportunity to meet someone from a different cultural background and learn so much from the experience."
When asked what he would say to someone contemplating becoming a tutor at Project Read, Chris says, "I’d tell them that it’s fun! It doesn’t feel like work and it’s a positive relationship because the learner really wants to be here."
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