Only student under my tutelage has been working on Maths, Hindi and English.
His handwriting is improving.
Key difficulty areas are:
Alphabets: He can’t write English alphabet. Believe it or not. Confuses ‘d’ with ‘b’. He’s 14 years old. Studying in standard 9th. Hindi medium.
Maths: Can’t do maths because can’t read Hindi. Questions are in Hindi. If you feel downhearted as soon as you start reading– chances are : you can’t grasp the problem and can’t solve it either.
Take a recent example: he was given an assignment to work out fourth, fifth and sixth questions from the first questionnaire of chapter fifth: Introduction to Euclid’s Geometry. He wasn’t able to identify if the solution was available in the guide. It was an open book test/assignment.
Reason: can’t differentiate between headings and sub-headings. Can’t differentiate between questions and subsections given in roman numerals.
Help: I offer my assistance. I work hard with students only to find parents and guardians who ask me to use corporeal punishment instead of getting to the core of the problems.
I am charging five hundred rupees per month for maths and English for home tuition because their economic situation is not very sound. The child needs constant reminders to work, to be punctual. He’s often sleepy because four to five hours per day are spent in supporting the fast food corner where he works with his elder brother.
My assessment: after having spent twenty days with this student: I feel he needs more time to study. Instead he seems compelled to work in his family business to support his family. Though he’s studying in standard ninth in a Hindi medium school: his reading and writing abilities indicate that he’s supposed to be in standard fourth or fifth at most.
For the last three to four years he didn’t attend school because of Covid. No online education either. Now having gotten general promotions through standards in school he’s like other average kids with learning disadvantages simply because Covid is not recognised by syllabus designers.
This kid is going to pass all exams until higher secondary because of goodwill and then work either through sports quota or as a chef to earn his living. This is how it works here in third world countries.
FYI: he makes more money than I do every day, every month, every year if you compare last ten years of earnings simply because I have mostly been unemployed in the last decade.
Academy of Sky 
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