I hate to go all campy, Rogers and Hammerstein musical on you, blogreaders, but I must: “It's a very ancient saying / But a true and honest thought / That if you become a teacher / By your pupils you'll be taught.”

K is, in his own sly way, teaching me a lot about what it means to be in 2nd grade—and let me tell you, the mores are WAY more nuanced then even the strictest Roberts Rules of Order board meeting.

For instance, our hour-long tutor sessions usually consist of me learning:

• Those that tutor right before recess should proceed at their own caution. (Think of all the 10 a.m. meetings you’ve ever sat through that extend relentlessly toward 1 p.m. and you get the picture.)

• When I break out our respective sets of reading books and materials, K will inform me that “pens aren’t allowed.”
• When I struggle to find a pencil (who uses pencils, anyway?!) of my own, he inevitably takes it from me at the end of the lesson.
• When it became established that he would likely be able to pilfer a pencil from me after each session, he has now mustered the courage to brazenly ask me for a pencil—neon is his preferred color—as a reward.
• All first graders that pass our session are glared and hissed at with the threatening epithet, “Firstsssss….”
• Most complaints on the difficulty of a given lesson can be easily assuaged by the sentence, “If you just finish X more, we can move on.”
• High fives aren’t cool any more. Ditto thumbs up.
• There are significantly more early dismissals in elementary school these days, then I remember.

Aside from my oh-so-incredible breakthroughs, K is actually making progress in his reading. Despite my likely terrible attempts to explain the difference between a “sentence” and a “fragment” (“Do you know what a verb is?” No. “Noun?” No. “Well, you know, when a sentence doesn’t sound complete?” Yeah. “Then it’s probably a fragment.”), he latched on to the concept easily and even made the erudite determination that fragments are “bad grammar.” Looks likes someone has used spell-check before.

After a couple of initially awkward attempts at reading aloud at length, K’s endurance as a reader is also getting better. While studying up on students that struggle with reading, I recently found that reading at length exhausts them, which is why they don’t practice frequently and don’t improve at the same rate as other students. K is the perfect example of this feedback cycle. K starts strong at the beginning of short stories, but loses steam by the third or fourth (short) paragraph. On Monday, he made it to the fifth paragraph.

Stay tuned for more of my reading adventures with K over coming weeks. And if you’re interested in becoming a reading buddy, visit Communities in Schools to learn more.