Tutoring & Kalman - Carefree Styles

 Katie West

April 7, 2021

    The fourth-grade girl, Sarah, who I touter for Bridges is drastically unlike the fourth-grade version of myself—and I find it hilarious. She has been absent for three (maybe four) tutoring sessions and as Kevin, her teacher, gets annoyed, Sarah doesn’t seem to mind in the slightest. Kevin will call her parents and brothers attempting to get a hold of her to log on to the Zoom call; Sarah has now arrived 30 minutes late (to our one-hour session) twice, both times covered in frosting and saying “oh sorry I wanted to bake cupcakes”, not worrying if shes caused a disturbance in the slightest. However, I was a fourth-grader would’ve been exactly ready at 5 o’clock terrified to be late or even worse get called out for it. There is something about her carelessness and how she puts her own happiness at the forefront of her life that makes me smile.

           I can normally squeeze in around twenty minutes of work before Sarah changes the subject, throwing all academic work out the window. Almost every week I get a tour of her messy, bedroom. She shows me every corner of her room ruffling through items she might want to show off to me. She normally shows me her artwork, drawings, sketches, and handwriting. She quickly skips through the pages of her sketchbook before I can even comment on it (and if I did, I’m not sure if she’d even listen to my compliments) she continues talking and giving me a lens into her life. A few weeks ago Kevin asked if I would work on organizational skills with Sarah. This was something I would thrive at. I know how to organize better than I know than math, Spanish, or science. When I tried to help Sarah organize the agenda that she hasn’t opened, she quickly changed the subject and gave me a tutorial on how to change the font colors and add animations in PowerPoint. During this day, I couldn’t contain my laughter. Sarah did not care if her school work was chaotic or messy, it didn’t bother her. We have also yet to make it through a tutoring session where a police or fire truck siren doesn’t go off—which always angers Sarah. So, Sarah creatively started a new project where she uses window markers and tallies every time she hears a siren driving down her street, even if it’s in the middle of the night. I am amazed and amused by this because I was raised in a small, secluded town in Upstate, New York--a few minutes just outside of Vermont. And Sarah is born and raised in Baltimore, yet we both get distracted siren and sound that passes on these Baltimore streets. She may be carefree, messy, and completely sassy but she at least makes me laugh and reminds me to relax a little and to keep my happiness and desires as a priority.

           The Principles of Uncertainty by Maria Kalman is filled with colorful illustrations, similar to Sarah’s sketchbooks. And a lot of Kalman’s text revolves around the idea of finding happiness or even trying to define your own happiness--something Sarah has mastered and isn’t afraid to do (even if that means taking a break after every math question to talk about her older ‘annoying’ sister). There’s something about Kalman’s carefree, sporadic, and creative writing style that reminds me of Sarah. Both Kalman and Sarah hold a quality I do not—their pages aren’t neatly organized and color-coded, they don’t keep perfect handwriting, and they don’t really care what others think. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Jesus Shaves" - Sedaris understanding of Humor

  Katie West  February 8, 2020  David Sedaris's collection,  The Best of Me,  creates, what I believe to be, a more common and neutral sense of humor (especially when in comparison to Ibry). Sedaris also uses many of the foundational philosophical elements of humor which we discussed last week within his writing. A perfect example that focuses on many aspects of humor is Sedaris’s essay, “Jesus Shaves”. This essay uses many tactics seen from philosophy; however, it is also on a very neutral level, it is appealing to everyone and is not too boring or too grotesque. David Sedaris opens this essay with a simple question, yet this question creates and builds into the description of a classroom setting. Sedaris immediately sets the tone for his mediocre care for French, and France, by stating that he will be “home and cleaning my oven” (69) on Bastille Day, the national French holiday to celebrate their country. He even later states that it was his “habit to tune out...
Read more

Sedaris' hyperbolism in "The incomplete Quad"

  When I began reading David Sedaris’ collection of essays in The Best of Me, I was turned off by the apparent smugness that came through the narrator. Even though it is apparent through his over-the-top hyperbolic style and tone, I left feeling unamused and a bit disgusted. Plainly, I felt as though the themes and motifs that Sedaris incorporates into these short anecdotes were muddled by the writer’s constant proclivity towards the antithetical virtues of a naive narrator. That being said, there is one particular essay that I did admire for its succinct message. In “The Incomplete Quad”, I was struck by the selfishness of the narrator and his inability to understand the nature of kindness. Sedaris weaves his narrative through his time at Kent State University where he took care of a paraplegic named Peg with Muscular Dystrophy. Throughout the short essay, Sedaris recalls the delinquent activities Peg and him engaged in from shoplifting to hitchhiking home to North Carolina from...
Read more

"Me (Never) Talk Pretty (In Italian) One Day"

      Sedaris' "Me Talk Pretty One Day" was not at all what I was expecting, yet I was pleasantly surprised. This chapter of the novel did not appear to be a humorous retell of Sedaris' time spent taking a french class. Rather, I had visions of it being a chapter dedicated to physical attractiveness. However, not only was this chapter unique and different from the usual memoir accounts I have read, but it was also extremely relatable. The fall of my junior year I spent the semester study abroad in Rome. While I could go on and tell you about the millions of stories I have about my travels, all the pasta I ate, and my prison-cell like apartment on the outskirts of Trastevere, Sedaris' account of his french class brings me back to my Italian class.       In short, my professor was horrid. She had very little tolerance for our class filled with American students who spoke not a lick of Italian. While my family is from Calabria and Modena, and my gran...
Read more