10 Jun Stories from the Hotline
Helping a friend…
Susan rang us from a coastal town seeking assistance to help her friend, Cameron. She does not have a teaching background so rang the Hotline seeking help to successfully mentor/ tutor her friend who has literacy challenges and doesn’t want to attend a class. We receive many calls from people like Susan who really want to help.
Cameron is a young man who says he stopped learning to read in Year 3 and feels like he can’t read and write. However, he has good handwriting.
Cameron had asked Susan for help to develop his literacy skills after breaking his back during work in a mining accident. He now realises that he won’t be able to do physical work for a living and so needs to improve his reading and writing. Cameron is clear that he is not ready to attend a class.
After scanning the web Susan had planned a session for him focussing on grammar and high frequency words. After chatting about the appropriateness of this approach the Hotline teacher provided the following assistance:
- Determined the learner’s skills level, negotiated an initial learning plan and discussed Cameron’s interests and goals
- Navigated the Hotline website together to discuss how to find appropriate level learning resources.
- Referred her to the Hotline’s online tutor training program and suggested starting with reading mentor notes.
- Discussed an initial approach for the first lesson using Hotline hardcopy resources.
- Emphasised the need to build Cameron’s trust and confidence and encourage some initial small wins.
- Explained Distance options for when he’s ready.
The importance of checking in…
One of our Hotline teachers phoned Nick, a previous caller, to see if he needed any further support. Nick, a First Nations man, was really happy to hear from the Hotline.
He said he’d stopped his literacy classes after a death and had, “fallen into a bad way”. During the ‘just checking in?’ phone call, Nick said that he was wasting his time and life. He really wanted to go back to literacy learning and keep busy with this, but he said he felt unconfident. He also expressed ‘shame’ about having stopped studying and about what people might think of him.
The Hotline teacher spoke with him about his abundant literacy and numeracy skills (evident from previous informal skills’ assessment) and about his goals and preferences. The teacher also talked about the fact that many adults dip in and out of learning for a range of valid reasons, and acknowledged his keenness to continue learning. With Nick’s permission, a referral to the Head Teacher at the campus where he had previously enrolled and wanted to continue was sent.