Final Blog Reflections on Service Learning Experiences

1. Connection to your own literacy experience:
In comparing my own literary experience with one of the students that I tutored, I would say that our literary experiences may have been pretty similar up to a certain point. For our lesson, we were primarily focusing on grammar and the pronunciation of long and short syllables. I remember learning a lot of this material when I was in elementary and middle school, but until now, had completely forgotten most of it. He seemed to have a similar experience, he kept saying that he must have learned all of it at some point, but I think he may have had some learning disabilities that had prevented him from being able to fully understand it. I believe he probably did learn all the material in school at some point, but he was able to only partially learn it because of some learning disability, and was passed through the system without someone realizing he never actually learned some fundamental knowledge because he needed to know. Not only that, it is possible the teachers assumed he was just being lazy or wasn't smart enough to learn the information, when in fact he had a disability preventing him from learning it the way he should. I was so fortunate in my education because I was always in very small classes where the teachers were able to be fully in tune with each student and their needs. I always knew that if I didn't understand something, I would be able to get the individual help I needed from a teacher. It was really interesting that my experiences have opened my eyes to the differences and similarities in our formative literary experiences.