10.10 Work - The Reason

Bestest Friend and I are in the middle of a blog project. Each day of the month we will post a picture on a pre-determined theme and write a little something about it. The theme for the tenth day of each month is "Work."
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When we first started meeting, her voice would shake when I would ask her to tell me some simple math fact.  When I would suggest we do a problem, her leg would start bobbing up and down, her fingers would clench her pencil tighter, and she would refuse to make eye contact.  When she would get a problem wrong, her lips would tighten, her eyes water, and the entire body would slowly but ever so surely turn away from me.

Hours and hours on math. Hours and hours drilling how to use the calculator, keep track of negative signs, and use the distributive property. 

She's never going to be a math genius. She's never going to LOVE it.

But when I asked her how the test went last week, she smiled at me. SMILED!

A strange business park where I meet with my student. The sun is still out! At 6:00pm!

"The math wasn't bad," she said. "I felt pretty good about it."

I know she's not going to go to an Ivy League school. I know she's probably going to be lucky to get into a mid-tier state school.  But, damn it, she feels so much better about herself.

That's my job.
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 To see what Bestest Friend wrote about the theme of the day, check out her blog, Too Legit to Quit.