So, This Is Hard

After my first day of actual teaching yesterday, I realized there will definitely be some unique challenges to working with the population at PSI. I want to start out by saying that I absolutely love working with them. The best part of my job is having the privilege of interacting with the patients here. They're a fun and rowdy bunch, which can definitely be a positive thing since it leads to thought provoking discussion and insightful questions about their disease. We will be facing our fair share of obstacles, however.

Two of the residents I teach have mild mental retardation. One has such poor vision that she cannot see the letters on the worksheet. One doesn't read a word of English, and can barely speak it. One decided five minutes in that she wasn't going to participate, but she didn't want to leave the room either and instead walked around loudly bothering the other residents. One proclaimed in class yesterday "I hate reading," to which I responded, "Well... this is a literacy class, so we're going to be doing a lot of reading."

Unlike teaching high school, I can't threaten the residents with consequences like detention or a deduction in their participation grade. The residents attend my class completely by their own free will, which is amazing. Also unlike teaching high school, about 10 minutes before class was done there was a large group of people waiting to cross through the area where I teach to go outside and take a cigarette break. Needless to say, this caused quite the distraction when they walked through my classroom, right as the residents were working on their quiz for the day. This 3:00 smoke break will happen at the end of every one of my classes.

Our objective for the day was to be able to read and answer questions about a paragraph on HIV/AIDS drugs. The average reading comprehension score on their diagnostic was a 65%. Amazingly, the average quiz score was an 86%, meaning they grew 21 percentage points in just one class! (If I discount the scores of the 2 residents with severe disabilities, the average jumps to a 93%). I'm so incredibly proud of each of my students. Hopefully their reading skills will continue to grow as the summer progresses.