Disability Issue

[Academic_cog]

Last year at my Fancy Tutoring Place I worked with a student on the spectrum whose fluency when reading out loud sounded pretty good but she had *no* comprehension of what she had just read. When we hit it off, the parents were ecstatic and booked me for "as many hours as would take" to pass the composition class she had already failed a couple times. I liked her and loved the amount of hours I was getting but I was doing soooo much of the executive function and higher order thinking for her —— scaffolding the shit outta things, being very directive, standing over her sentence by sentence and giving a starting phrase for each one —- that I felt guilty that she passed comp 1A when she clearly wasn't mentally capable. It got worse when they signed her up for history and comp 1B and even with me basically doing all the thinking for her she was struggling. She and I both had a couple meltdowns, with me increasingly shouting my concerns to the tutoring enrollment manager, and the whole thing fell apart right about the end of the semester. I think the family might have finally given up on community college for her this year, but dang if they didn't put a lot of shitty pressure on her first.

So my takeaways from that experience are: parents will do absolutely anything to get what they think their kids need regardless of whether it is the best for them or ethical, scaffolding after a certain point makes a class not college level (my cc colleagues do not agree with this), and you absolutely need one or two timed, high stakes writing assignments in class to counter the weight of excessive outside help, whether it's from parents, spouses, or paid tutors.