The greatest fear I have is losing everything because of a hospitalization. This all can effect learning.

It helps to try to make a lesson around some of these things, like job forms and income tax, budgeting, going to a store and shopping and going out to dinner and learning how to pay a bill, going to a bank, etc. All of this can help to make people like me feel more normal.

It's best to find out when they have had their shot and to set classes two days after it.

Praise is important to your student. It is also important to your student to feel good about their learning and self.

How We Wrote the Article

The following is from the journal that Cathy and I keep to record her progress. As homework, Cathy wrote down everything she could remember about her time in hospital. This material was twelve pages long.

When we had our next session we edited this material together. I asked her to list on a separate piece of paper, in point form, all the things she wanted to say. Then I asked her who she wanted to talk to, and, from her list, what the most important item was that she wanted to tell them. We decided that this point would be last, and then together we worked out a logical way to get to that point using the other items in her list. This is the final order we came up with:

1. Introduction.
2. Medication. What it's like to be dependent
3. Withdrawal.
4. How you lose skills.
5. Learning.
6. How I learn without medicine.
7. Ideas for tutors to help students.

We then read through all of Cathy's notes, cut the pages up with scissors into different topics, and divided these scraps of paper into piles on the table. We put the different piles in the order we wanted them to appear, based on the list we had made, and numbered each pile, so we'd know how to put the article together.

To avoid duplication and still get everything in that Cathy wanted to say, we read through each pile, pulled out sentences that were too much the same, and tried to make each sentence as to-the-point as possible.

We stapled our selected sentences together, then stapled all the piles together in the order we wanted them to be in, and read the story out loud to be sure.

Our last step was to correct the spelling, and the result was an article saying just what Cathy wanted to say. (We used the words that Cathy had trouble spelling as a spelling test later.)

This was Cathy's first attempt at organizing an essay - previously she wrote down what came into her head, without thinking about what she had just written or wrote after, or what she wanted to accomplish with her story. I'm happy to say that Cathy now can write stories without going through the motion of physically cutting up individual thoughts — she makes her plan before she starts, and mentally puts her sentences and paragraphs together before writing her story.

Cathy Jones was born in Toronto and grew up in rural Ontario. She now lives in Toronto and works with a tutor at East End Literacy. She also has been active in various groups and the Evaluation Committee at East End, and contributes stories to their student-written publication. In addition, she now attends upgrading classes at Monseigneur Fraser School where she is working on Grades 9, 10 and 11. Cathy is very proud of the fact that she has been off drugs for a year.

Chris Brown grew up on a farm in Uxbridge, Ontario, and now works for film company in Toronto doing internal communications. She took the volunteer tutor training course in the fall of 1987 and has been working with Cathy since then. She is also a member of the East End Literacy Press committee.