superhero-ing.
i have a new found respect for my brother, mark, who tutors inner-city youth on tuesdays and thursdays in phoenix, az. in fact, i have a great respect for all the superhero tutors, teachers, and educators out there. this was my first week tutoring at 826nyc, the youth literacy center in brooklyn (part of dave eggar's national literacy nonprofit), and, let me tell you, it is not easy nurturing the future of america. mind you, my tutoring is nowhere near as challenging as mark's tutoring... for the most part, my kids have pretty stable backgrounds, conscientious parents, and decent schools. none of them are really troublemakers, and most of them seem pretty engaged in the work that they have to do.
but, it's still hard hard hard work... there's nothing easy about teaching kids. its like holding an egg in your hands... you don't want to hold it too tight and crush it... but you don't to hold it too loosely and drop it. there needs to be boundaries to guide them, but freedom to move as well. its a delicate balance, and i didn't really comprehend how delicate until i spent an afternoon tutoring. you have to frame your questions and your interactions carefully so that you foster a sense of wonder and curiosity, but also acknowledge that, in some cases, there is an answer to arrive at. boy, was i really humbled!
making learning, and homework, fun is the challenge... a lot of time was spent just asking questions. and, if i remember correctly from my converation with mark, that's a big piece of these afterschool tutoring programs, just having a conversation with these kids. one of my kids, fabian, had an essay assignment in which he had to take three statements about his reading style and support each one with three reasons to come up with a paragraph. we talked about his favorite book, socks, by beverly cleary (boy was i so excited that kids still read beverly cleary!) and why he liked it. all the while, through the assignment i just asked him questions. why did you like the friendship between the baby and the cat? what does it remind you of? oh, you have a cat at home? why do you like beverly cleary? when he finished his assignment, he stayed with me an extra few minutes to draw me a picture of a dragon hatching out of an egg... it really is the little things like that that make you all warm and fuzzy inside.
my other kid, whose name escapes me, actually ended up teaching me a few tricks in math. first he taught me about the multiplying 9s. you write the numbers 0 to 9 down in a column, then reverse the column and write 9 to 0 along side to get the numbers for multiples of 9:
09
18
27
36
45
54
63
72
81
90
after that, he taught me about multiplication lattices, which are really, incredibly cool! that one i'll have to show you in person. i could not contain my excitement, and we worked through several multiplication lattices together. and it was completely genuine that he was teaching me, and i was, in fact, learning something from him... which really debunked the idea i had that i would be doing the tutoring. in fact, it reinforced this notion i have of learning being a two-way street, and that people have just as much to gain from tutoring as they have to give. service learning, as it is sometimes called, is really a valuable experiential component of education, and should be instituted far more frequently in far more schools.
but, it's still hard hard hard work... there's nothing easy about teaching kids. its like holding an egg in your hands... you don't want to hold it too tight and crush it... but you don't to hold it too loosely and drop it. there needs to be boundaries to guide them, but freedom to move as well. its a delicate balance, and i didn't really comprehend how delicate until i spent an afternoon tutoring. you have to frame your questions and your interactions carefully so that you foster a sense of wonder and curiosity, but also acknowledge that, in some cases, there is an answer to arrive at. boy, was i really humbled!
making learning, and homework, fun is the challenge... a lot of time was spent just asking questions. and, if i remember correctly from my converation with mark, that's a big piece of these afterschool tutoring programs, just having a conversation with these kids. one of my kids, fabian, had an essay assignment in which he had to take three statements about his reading style and support each one with three reasons to come up with a paragraph. we talked about his favorite book, socks, by beverly cleary (boy was i so excited that kids still read beverly cleary!) and why he liked it. all the while, through the assignment i just asked him questions. why did you like the friendship between the baby and the cat? what does it remind you of? oh, you have a cat at home? why do you like beverly cleary? when he finished his assignment, he stayed with me an extra few minutes to draw me a picture of a dragon hatching out of an egg... it really is the little things like that that make you all warm and fuzzy inside.
my other kid, whose name escapes me, actually ended up teaching me a few tricks in math. first he taught me about the multiplying 9s. you write the numbers 0 to 9 down in a column, then reverse the column and write 9 to 0 along side to get the numbers for multiples of 9:
09
18
27
36
45
54
63
72
81
90
after that, he taught me about multiplication lattices, which are really, incredibly cool! that one i'll have to show you in person. i could not contain my excitement, and we worked through several multiplication lattices together. and it was completely genuine that he was teaching me, and i was, in fact, learning something from him... which really debunked the idea i had that i would be doing the tutoring. in fact, it reinforced this notion i have of learning being a two-way street, and that people have just as much to gain from tutoring as they have to give. service learning, as it is sometimes called, is really a valuable experiential component of education, and should be instituted far more frequently in far more schools.
posted by cheeky monkey at 12:49 PM
1 Comments:
Tell the chillins there's an even cooler way of calculating multiples of 9 (which i use to this day, mostly when no one's looking). Hold out your ten fingers. If you're multiplying 9 x 3, bend your third finger from the left, ie your left middle finger (note - make sure you dont do the opposite of this, otherwise you'll be giving the birdie to your little ones which isnt a good thing for a tutor to do i hear). You'll see that you have 2 fingers to the left of the bent finger, and 7 fingers to the right - 27, like the answer to the math problem! It works for all multiples of 9 up to 9.
Post a Comment
<< Home