Molding Young Minds

For the past month I've been tutoring a high school student who wants to get into A.P. French in this, her senior year. School starts for her tomorrow and in the next few days, she's slated to take the exam that was given to the honors level junior year French class in the spring. If she passes, she gets into the A.P. class. If not, she stays in the regular-level senior French class. I reeeeeeeeally want her to pass.

We worked on everything to the point of exhaustion: relative pronouns, comparatives and superlatives, si clauses, even the dreaded subjunctive. I worried a lot that I wasn't teaching her these concepts very well, that I was presenting them to her in a way completely opposite from the way the teachers at her school taught them, that I was leaving out essential points. But I must say that despite all that, I really enjoy tutoring, which I suppose makes sense. When I was teaching high school English, the only part I actually enjoyed was the one-on-one extra help sessions I had with my students. I'm definitely not one to get off on "performing" in front of a class.

Anyway, if such a thing is possible, I might be more nervous about this test than my tutee is. I feel like I've nurtured this little fledgling as carefully and as diligently as I could, and now I have to turn her out into the wild where she'll either sink or swim. Of course the stakes aren't quite so high, but I have still have my fingers and toes double-crossed for her. I guess you could say that somewhere along the way I got pretty invested in this whole thing.