Books and Biscuits

Last Tuesday was our last day for the year of books and basketball—the tutoring program I’ve been doing for the last year. Glad as I am to have a summer break, I’m really going to miss it.

I tutored a fabulous 12-year-old girl, who spent the first half hour running away from me and the second half hour telling me about Mitchel Musso while I tried to get her to do her math homework.

Was she rambunctious? Yes. Did the other tutors give me the evil eye every week? Oh yes. And was she totally worth it? Absolutely.

My favorite was the rap she made up about our multiplication problem. The answer was 16, which you can write in green when you’re seventeen if you’re not too mean. In the picture she's trying very hard to look angry with me.

“Working” with her was great, but it definitely reminded me of how often service is not what I expect. I thought I might sweep in and be a noble role model and brilliant teacher for a struggling inner-city kid, when really all she needed was someone to listen to occasionally tease her about her Disney Channel crush.

It reminded me of About a Boy, which we read last month for the Movie Book Club. The self-absorbed Will, who has suddenly found himself unwillingly mentoring the needy young Marcus, isn’t quite sure what to do to help the kid—or even sure if he wants to:

“The thing was, Will had spent his whole life avoiding real stuff. He was, after all, the son and heir of the man who wrote Santa’s Super Sleigh. Santa Claus, whose existence most adults had real cause to doubt, bought him everything he wore and ate and drank and sat on and live on; it could reasonably be argued that reality was not in his genes. He liked watching real stuff on [TV] . . . but he’d never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before. No wonder, then, that once he’d made it a cup of tea and offered it a biscuit he didn’t really know what to do with it.” (Nick Hornby)

This girl was real stuff. And I wasn’t quite sure what to do about her. But I liked my weekly encounters with someone else’s reality and daydreams.