On one hand, I'm happy to be able to pinpoint who my case study is about; on the other, I'm unhappy to report that I don't have a simple, strong story to tell, in part because it's still unfolding.
My tutee Lulu has missed two out of six tutorials, so she's looking more and more unlikely as my study subject.
My tutee Luigi is showing promising signs of increased motivation and improvement. He's showing up a bit more organized, less apathetic and his writing is looking up, even if his teacher has little praise for him (I disagree with her lack of praise and her focus on minutiae).
However, the story unfolding is less clear than I thought it was a couple of weeks ago. At that time, I thought this might be a story about helping Luigi with organizational skills and in focusing on the prompt, which he was often vague about. At this time, I'm thinking the story (if there is one simple story buried in all of this) is how to motivate Luigi to believe in himself as a successful writer, and/or to equip him with a clear model of what a good essay looks like.
As I wrote in my tutoring report, it's still not clear, though, if he's the clever writer I think he is (just too unmotivated to really edit his paper), or whether he's a decent writer with really mediocre editing skills, especially since he's failed to implement the ideas we discussed for his revisions two weeks ago, and now the teacher is complaining, generally, about exactly the organizational points I brought up back then. It may be that we're just asking too much too soon from him.
My hunch is that he needs a Bartholomae & Petrosky bootcamp of deep reading immersion and deeply personal writing to wake him up to the deeper possibilities of the reading/writing connection. The truth is doesn't read much, never has. So realizing his full potential may take some time.
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