Journal Entry - May 24th 2005

Wow! Only one meeting left! That went so terribly fast, it's amazing.

We worked on our projects, we got them about half finished. We hope to finish them up this next meeting. It shouldn't take very long, since she got the hang of beading pretty well after doing five or six rows a half a dozen times each. ;) I'm also going to see if she wants to meet this summer at all, or maybe just exchange Emails if she feels she needs any help with anything or wants assistance in finding information about anything in particular. I want her to know that I'm available if she wants to talk to me, but no pressure if she doesn't.

She is very excited about summer. The day after she gets out of school she's going back up to Washington for a week, and it's all she could talk about. I think the break from worrying about what she'll be doing this coming September will be good for her. Her mother has decided not to homeschool her, but told her she'll know for sure by the end of summer. I know that it is leading to some anxiety on my Mentee's part because she doesn't like feeling so up in the air about high school, especially since being a Freshman is so much on it's own.

I told her if she had any questions or if she wanted information about any programs I could probably find them for her, but I also encouraged her to talk to her mom about her options and help her mom decide which ones would be best for her, and letting her mom know that she is nervous about high school, and where she might (or might not) be going.

I gave her more information for online tutors. Basically the ones I'm finding work like this: you have a question or problem about something (let's say a math problem) and you're assigned a teacher. That teacher helps you over E-mail, or chat rooms, or message boards, to try and help explain the problems and how to work them. Some of them even have web videos, software, and other things that you can watch to try and get the lessons. Also, they help with everything from math to English, and it may be a good resource for her for not just her algebra problems. I also gave her more for in-person tutoring (like Sylvan and whatnot) so if she felt more comfortable with that, she could utilize it. Hopefully some of this information is helpful to her.