Sophie TS #7

At the beginning of our tutoring session, Kiki and I caught up on what we've been up to in the past week. We then continued to go over our reading from last week. I asked her what she remembered from the reading, and I had her point out clues within the reading that support what she's saying. We then started with the new paragraphs of the reading, and she primarily used a top-down approach to figure out what the words meant. We spent a significant amount of time focusing on this sentence as Kiki deciphered it:

The work of renowned historian Todd Gitlin re›ects a commonThe work of renowned historian Todd Gitlin re›ects a common"The work of renowned historian Todd Gitlin reflects a common thread in much politically liberal sixties scholarship, implying that the era as a whole was defined by laudable attempts at progressive social change in the face of a dominant, oppressive system." 

In this sentence, Kiki used context clues to understand the words "laudable," "scholarship," "oppressive," "progressive," and the phrase "common thread." Some of the words, such as "scholarship," were known to her with a different meaning, so she had to learn the new meaning of the word. The phrase "common thread" took some time for me to explain, and I drew pictures on the white board to make it more clear. I also had her make a few of her own sentences with this phrase to make sure she understood. The word "progressive" in this context is very culture-dependent, so I built off of her existing knowledge of the American political climate to help explain this idea. She had to use the word "reflect" to determine how Todd Gitlin fits into this narrative and discern the overall point of the sentence; she originally thought reflect meant "dissent," which would change the meaning of the entire sentence. Finally, she used context clues to explain the phrase, "in the face of," so I didn't have to explain it to her.