tutor

I think I want to help with study skills… Though I work better with the small ones K-3

I got a job as a “grader” at a tutoring center. I mostly just grade little practice packets the kids are assigned but I do get the chance to actually tutor every once in a while when a kid gets up the guts to ask for help. I honestly do prefer private tutoring but this job is more stable. It’ll do for now.

I love teaching. There’s this deep sense of satisfaction when I see improvements made by my students. It’s nice to know that my former students got accepted to the school of their choice. I’m happy and I wish them success in their studies.

I have my interview tomorrow! I’m not exactly the most prepared for it, but I’m hoping if I go in honestly and enthusiastically that I’ll pull through.

I want this job so very much.

I submitted my application to Score! tutoring center today, and now it’s just a matter of waiting and wishing.

I tutor math & english. It’s very rewarding and by teaching others I find that I learn something new myself.

I like helping other people learn something – it’s a good feeling when they suddenly realize that they figured it out.

Today I had my first real tutoring session, and it was for Algebra, which I haven’t studied for how many years?? It was a great feeling when I realized I still knew how to do it.

It probably helped too that the student saw that I was basically re-teaching myself. And we got so excited when we figured out problems, and then she figured the others out on her own…

Ah, good ol’ knowledge.

done it

After working for AmeriCorps in a ghetto high school for a year and a half, I realized that black teenage men (and women) are being left behind—far behind—by our school system. (No Child Left Behind should be retitled: “No White Child Left Behind.”)

As a professional writer (advertising, short stories, essays, movie reviews) and a voracious reader, I feel that being unable to read and communicate is an appalling tragedy. I don’t think you can fulfill your potential in this country and become truly yourself without these skills. I want to open up these new worlds of possibility to young black males. I want to work with males because I also want to be their mentor.

At 71, I want to devote the rest of life to this task.

The irony is that although I have been a volunteer at the Center for Literacy since 1995 and have done volunteer tutoring in our public schools, I cannot get a job with the School District of Philadelphia because I don’t have a college degree. In other words, I’m qualified to be a tutor until it’s a question of being paid for it; then I’m suddenly unqualified.