Dhugal Gardner TP 7

I met with Abdullah yesterday after his classes, for a sort of follow up on our last meeting. The date of his ACT test is looming, and as we learned last time, he could use reading practice. So we went back to the ACT test site and selected another reading sample test. Before we began, I reminded him of the strategies we covered a few days earlier (see TP 6).

Unfortunately, the passage we selected was deathly boring. But we've all taken these standardized tests, and know they purposefully choose uninteresting topics to spite us. This was a critical literary passage outlining the difficulties of classifying women's poetry in a male dominated canon-how riveting. The passage was dense and contained stuffy, academic language, so I knew Abdullah was in for a tough one. He did take over 10 minutes to read the passage, and another 10 to answer the questions. The only thing working in his favor was that despite the difficult language, all the questions specified the location in the passage where the answer could be found.

I believe he got 4 correct out of 10. I wish I could better prepare him for his test on Saturday, but I'm afraid some of it is over his head at this point. To finish up, I reinforced the strategies we had discussed, and urged him to practice, as that is the only way to improve.