Adventures in Tutoring
by John Pearson
I'm afraid I haven't been living up to my own expectations. Three weeks into the current summer vacation, I fully expected by now to be sleeping past noon every day and staying up until two every night.
Instead, I just finished up a week of early morning tutoring. High school tutoring, at that!
Thank my sister-in-law. She works at my old high school as an administrative assistant, and she received an e-mail saying that the school would be hosting a tutoring program for area public school students. She immediately thought of me and forwarded the contact information.
She later told me that she didn't really think I would apply, as I now live about an hour away from Fort Worth and gas prices being as high as they are. I told her I laugh in the face of rising crude oil prices! Also, I had just taken my car into the shop, and the money earned from tutoring would almost exactly cover the repair costs. You do the math.
The Friday before tutoring began, I took an online training course where I learned that normally, during the school year, tutoring sessions last for about an hour each day, and the program lasts over a month. For my tenure, however, the program would be compacted down to 6 four-hour days. This is the same concept I apply to sleep during the school year. I can't get eight hours every night, so I try to get 40 hours each weekend.
Upon arriving at the high school on Monday morning and wandering back to a distant hallway that had not been present when I was a student there, I found that the first day would consist mainly of administering a pre-assessment and then going over study skills and test-taking tips. Two rooms were in use -- one contained high school students, and one contained middle school students. I wound up giving the tests to the middle schoolers.
After the tests, the other tutors and I had some pretty good interaction with the kids, going over strategies and suggestions for being a better student (sadly absent from the list -- wearing a fake mustache). We had a chance to bond a little bit with some of the kids and talk with them.
On Tuesday, I was moved to the high school room. So much for bonding.
The actual tutoring turned out to be more monitoring than anything. Each kid was given a packet that correlated to his/her ability level, and we the teachers were just there to offer help when needed and to occasionally grade a few pages of work.
To say that some kids took it more seriously than others would be a major understatement. However, rather than spending all of my time trying to keep some kids on task (I get enough of that from August through June), I decided to focus on the kids who were actually doing their work.
Helping those kids out provided a flashback to several math concepts that I had not seen in quite a while. But I was amused to see how many things these high schoolers were covering that were the same as what we cover in third grade -- identifying place value, rounding, and dividing. Of course, they were doing these things with much larger numbers than we use. For my third graders, 23,416 -- twenty- three thousand, four hundred sixteen -- is a large number to write out in words. If I were to ever write out a number like 672,418,369,027,985.268 -- six hundred seventy-two trillion, four hundred eighty billion, three hundred sixty-nine million, twenty-seven thousand, nine hundred eighty-five and two hundred sixty-eight thousandths -- my kids would no doubt go crazy with ecstasy and hail me as a living deity.
Now that the 24-hour tutoring period is over, students and teachers alike can get on with their lazy summers. And I can finally get my car out of the shop.
John Pearson is a third-grade math and science teacher in Dallas, Texas. He has degrees in mechanical engineering from Duke University and Texas A&M, so most consider his math abilities adequate enough to teach nine-year olds. He is also the author of Learn Me Good (Lulu, 2006), a funny, fictionalized account of his first year in education. Read more at learnmegood2.blogspot.com
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Posted by Mystery Teacher on Jul 7, 2008 12:02 am
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Posted by Becky on Jul 8, 2008 7:19 pm