Zach did not bring in his history materials, so we didn't get to do extra research for that class as planned. But we did finally find a fantastic dramatic dialogue for him to perform. It's title "wasted talent" and is about a musician who gave up on his art and faded away. Zach is really into it and I think he'll do a good job with it. Apparently, he's in good shape with all of his classes and on top of everything.
discuss history notes
read english paper
dramatic monologue
Zach did a solid job on his english paper, but had a lot of editing to do to get it ready to hand in. He did not send it to me over the weekend, so this was the first I saw of it. His paragraph structure has improved, but he still had a bunch of punctuation and grammar errors that could have been easily fixed. We talked about history and made a plan for how to approach the next test. We then looked at different potential dramatic monologues.
We started off talking about Zach's grade in history. He didn't have his notes or materials with him, but it's understandable why he's not doing as well in this class as others. They only have access to the textbook in class, and the only thing he has to study are the notes the teacher gives them, sometimes directly and sometimes not. The bottom line is that he's not getting enough information in class for the material to really sink in. From now on he's going to bring in his notes and we'll do additional research and discussion to make sure he's got it down. As for his paper on genocide, we went over and fine tuned his outline. It's a basic paper, but he was writing it more like a persuasive essay. We then worked on his introduction and thesis statement. He's going to email me when he's done with the first draft, and I will go over it and get it back to him over the weekend.
Unless he's not being honest with me, Zach seems to be in great shape in school. He's staying on top of all of his classes and assignments. I finally convinced him to pick a monologue from Brighton Beach Memoirs, which I suggested weeks ago when we first began the search. He seems very excited it and I'm looking forward to working on the project with him.
We have finally come up with a couple of solid options for Zach's comedy monologue. He's going to take them into his teacher to hopefully get approved. One that we found is from one of his favorite movies, and he is very excited to perform that one. I checked in with his other classes, and Zach insists that he is totally caught up and has no other work or pressing issues.
We continued looking for a good comedy monologue for Zach, but his refusal to do another monologue from Shakespeare kind of limits us. I'm actually shocked by how difficult it is to find something good. We had a couple of ideas, but they got rejected this week because they are from musicals. We'll find something eventually.
Zach has a new assignment coming up for drama and needs to find a comedy monologue. We spent the session searching, reading, and discussing different options. We didn't pick anything, but have a good idea of what direction we want to go.
Zach seems to be in great shape at GSTAR. He's on top of all his classes, and is totally current in his work. We then spent the remainder of the class working on his Hamlet monologue. He has a little over a week to learn it and has some work to do.
Zach finished up his packet for Hamlet, and I'm very pleased with his effort on the project. I would have liked to go over the paper with him, but he handed it in before our session, and didn't have his computer with him. We went over his Romeo and Juliet lines for his theater class, and spent the rest of the session discussion Life of Pi, which is a new book he's starting.
Austin did not have all of his materials with him, so we really couldn't get too much into a discussion about organization. But he seems to be in good shape, at least with his notes and test prep. He has programs to organize everything and seems to be good at using them. We talked about his strengths and weaknesses and what he hopes to accomplish. He's going to bring in all of his stuff next week so we can start going through it. We then worked on his math problems, which seemed to go very well. He has a lot of trouble with manipulating equations, but we went over it and he seemed to improve.
