Sun, Feb 8

I get there, and we quickly get to the 2nd material on the test. He puts on a good show of wanting to get started, but that quickly devolves into him telling me that it was boring. The story was not boring, and he later enjoyed reading it. In fact, he liked it so much he read the parts he liked again out loud. 

After reading I gave him one page of the test at a time. He keping asking how much there was left to do and how long before I leave. I refused to let him know either. My previous experience has shown giving him any information outside of the current topic would only supply him with ammunion to complain, distract, delay, and manipulate. 

I gave him a break and reviewed his answers. He did not do as well as I would have expected, given that he enjoyed the story so much. The answers he gave appreared, at first, to be from a consistantly different story.

After the break, I gave him the 3rd material to read. He delayed and attempted to distract me with questions and a desire to look things up on the computer or on the globe. After insisting that he read, he settled for a short period to reading. However, this lasted only a few minutes. 

I explained to him that passing the test was more important than any time in the past. Without passing the test he would be held back for a whole year. He would be the big kid in the class, and that might not be so fun without all his friends. It took about 10 minutes of explaining and answering his questions for him to realize that the test is important. How much of that understanding actually got into his head I do not know. 

He began to read the 3rd material again, but he started to drift from the task. I let him know that I knew that he did not care about the test, but he stopped me before I could finish. He began to read in ernest. I then gave him the test questions for the 3rd material. 

After finishing, I gave him a break so that I could examine the results. He got 7 answers out of 13 incorrect. The answers he did give seemed to indicate that he read the material but got some of the meaning of the words wrong. After looking back at his 2nd material, I could see that he does have a problem with understanding some words. He skips over the words he does not understand and does not attempt to figure out their meaning.  Either he has not developed a skill in reasoning out contextual definitions, or he is not interested in knowing what really happend in the story. He is satified with the gist of the story. 

I spent 2 1/2 hours getting him to do the test and going over the material.