Relevancy during Shadowing

I shadowed my student last Friday and it was really great. We'll call him Robert. He is a student whom my co-op and I kind of have mixed feelings about. I like the kid and, despite him being a pain most of the time, don't mind having him in my class. My co-op doesn't really like him, though. She doesn't think he has a chance to redeem himself. I don't know if it's because I'm more willing to work with him, but he seems to respond better to me than my co-op. The co-teacher also brought up the point that he is of Mexican background and culturally he might appreciate males more than females (my co-op and the co-teacher are both female). Anyone have any thoughts on this? I would have never thought about that until they mentioned it. Anyone else experience this?

I asked Robert at some point throughout the semester if he liked to write. I saw that he was always drawing and I thought I would occasionally see a hint of writing mixed in with his stuff. To this he told me that he likes writing poetry and sometimes short stories. Bam. There it is. There is my connection to this student. Well, after weeks of asking him every time I saw him if he could bring in some writing for me to check out, still nothing. But during my shadowing I was able to bring up some relevancy during his computer class. He was writing a blog post that had some pretty bad grammar and sentence errors which made it slightly difficult to read. After helping him with some of them I brought up the point of needing to write well to be a successful writer. This seemed to make sense to him.

I'm really glad that I could shadow this specific student and get to know more about why he does what he does. I wish we could shadow all of our students and learn this much about them!