Today was a great day with Ray. His writing has already improved since we started, and today we really got into the rules and application of commas, which is something that really stresses him when writing. I took it step by step and used examples of what he might right in his reports. Ray is an excellent student and really fun to work with. I'm learning more about his weaknesses and needs each time we meet, and I think he's getting a lot out of the class.

Today was another great session with Ray. He came in with 4 typed pages of freewriting, and again, he's not far off. We went through all of it, with me showing him his mistakes and explaining how he could have written it differently. This was good both for him, but also for me to see what direction we should go. Ray is a willing and eager learner, which is always fun.

It was a very interesting first meeting. Obviously, the first step was getting to know Ray, assessing his skills and figuring out what his goals are. I think his issues are two fold. First, he's dealing with a language barrier, and secondly, and more importantly, he's got a terrible block when it comes to writing. He's so sure he can't write that he literally blocks himself. To start the lesson, I asked him to write me a basic paragraph about why he likes being a state trooper. He got two sentences into it and couldn't write anymore. We had a good conversation about developing ideas and pre-writing, but I'm not sure coming up with ideas is his problem. It's more his anxiety about writing properly. At the end of the lesson, I had him do a 10 minute free write and told him not to think about grammar or structure, just write. He wrote for 10 minutes straight, filled a page and actually made very few grammatical mistakes. His paragraph structure needs work but I think he's a lot better writer than he thinks he is. But we're going to start with basic sentence structure next week and build from there.