Putting Theory into Practice

While learning many new things to expand my repertoire as a writing teacher at the 7VWP Summer Institute I have had the opportunity to learn and grow so much in just 4 days. I can't imagine what will happen to me at the end of these 3 weeks.  I am tutoring a student twice a week this summer in the evenings.  I am in awe of how the ideas; concepts; demos; conversations; writing prompts; and people I'm working with have impacted my practice already.  This week I tutored the student I'm working with for 2 nights in a row.  We have tried so many of the ideas I've learned and he is growing so much as a writer already.  I had him write chapter titles that he would like to write about his own life while I did the activity as well.  He asked for more time!  When we first started the tutoring sessions this summer I couldn't get him to write for more than a few seconds, and tonight he asked for more time.  We are doing 3 minute chunks of time now, which doesn't sound like a lot, but he literally can't attend for more than 1 minute without becoming very distracted.  He's genuinely excited about writing some of these chapters now.  Last night I started writing him questions and having him respond only with writing and then he would create the question and I would reply.  He asked to do that activity again tonight.  We wrote a creative response to looking at a painting of Mona Lisa.  His was about her wanting to go and buy a hamster and mine was about her being a mother who could always have her eyes on her silly children since it appears that no matter what direction she is looking she is looking right at you.  That must be a mother!  Our last activity of the session was to write what we want to do soon.  I wrote about writing and my aspirations to write teacher articles, publish my poetry, and explore writing a novel.  He wrote, "I want to eat brownies, cake, ice cream, popsicles and fondant."  He cracked me up when he said, "well I can't have all this, but you said to write about what I wanted to do soon and if it could be anything, all I could think to write about was what I wanted to eat!" I replied, sweetie, I love that you took this in a different direction than I expected. I learned more about you this way.  He looked at me and said you are coming back tomorrow, right?  I said, sorry buddy we already had our 2 sessions this week, so I'll see you next week, but feel free to start writing one of those chapters.  He then giggled and said, I may have to write 2.  Can it possibly get better than this?