A friend of mine recently asked me what I like about tutoring. I thought it was a strange question, because to me it feels to me like the perfect part time job. When I told him this he just shook his head and said that he was so glad that he didn’t have to read Jane Eyre or touch a geometry problem for the rest of his life. That made me smile, because his job – car salesman – is something that I know I would absolutely hate. It’s good to know that there’s an ideal job out there for everyone, and that it’s different for everybody.
So what is it that I love about tutoring? What is that drives me to help my students, makes me review statistics and calculus at home, causes me to dream up new explanations and tutoring techniques while I drift off to sleep at night?
It’s really two things. For starters, I genuinely find high school math and science genuinely interesting. A lot of people like sudoku and word problems. Me? I like SATs and word problems. There’s a puzzle behind every exam and homework assignment; when you sit down pencil in hand it is a battle of wits between you and the teacher. Although I must no longer take those tests myself, it is still a vicarious pleasure helping my students wrestle with a tough problem, turn their mental gears, and finally achieve that eureka moment.
Secondly, I really like helping people. That sounds cliche, but it’s the truth. When I was in school I struggled with a lot of my subjects and fell behind. It’s the worst feeling, and one we are all familiar with. Who hasn’t had that dream where you’re taking an exam for a class you’ve never attended? Well my students are still going through that, and I love be able to hoist them back onto dry land.
Writing competency is a vital step towards academic success in middle school, high school, and higher education. The establishment of a comfort level with regard to essay writing is fundamental. Many students moving from middle to high school become overwhelmed when assigned their first paper. Most are even more flabbergasted when they arrive at college and are required to write term papers.
At Study Hut, our tutors work with your students to build an outline—a formula, of sorts—for a paper which we think can be applied to writing universally. This formula starts with and builds upon a thesis statement, which declares the general purpose of the essay. Thesis statement writing is too frequently overlooked in compulsory English or writing education, so many students don’t know where to begin or how to address a topic or prompt. By teaching them the simple skill of jotting down their first meaningful statement of purpose, we hope to provide students with a foundation upon which they can do nothing but grow and learn.
Well-roundedness—it seems like a harmless enough idea on paper, but the drive to become a “well-rounded” student is pushing today’s students to the limit.
Grades alone are no longer enough, so our kids are spreading themselves thin trying to be the combination of athlete, artist, musician and scholar that will catch a college’s attention. This is in addition to coping with being a teenager, which comes with its own slurry of issues.
Films like, “Race to Nowhere”, are bringing to light a problem that many parents and educators have been aware of for a while—our students have too many academic and extra-curricular responsibilities and not enough time for themselves. They spend so much time trying to be what colleges want that many don’t figure out what their own passions are, which leaves them vastly, and ironically, unprepared for college and the real world.
The Study Hut tutors, many not too far from our own high school experiences, understand the pressures that our students deal with inside and outside of the classroom. We know that our work is more than teaching academics and study skills. We take advantage of our positions as role models to help guide healthy emotional and social development, so when our students do decide where they want to go, they are able to get there.
Education reform is a hot topic in politics and our communities. With documentaries like Waiting for Superman and powerful people taking a stance in education, people are starting to realize that things need to change. Successful schools have proven that outstanding teachers, extra time spent on education and high expectations for all students are key to academic achievement. At Study Hut, our tutors put these educational goals into action have seen exceptional results in our students.
Why is it so important to have high expectations for students? High expectations show students that we believe that they are capable of achieving their full potential. This turns into motivation for students to prove to us and to themselves that they can do well in school. I often hear fellow tutors saying “you are going to do an awesome job on your test tomorrow!” Students leave knowing their tutors expect them to perform well. When students at Study Hut are as excited to come in and tell us about an A on a test as much as we are, we know we are doing our job.
Excellent tutors at the Hut also add to students’ academic success. Students come to us because they need clarity, review and a fresh approach to teaching. If it takes a funny song to remember Spanish Vocabulary, we’ll make one up and sing it with our students. If history isn’t making sense, we will relate it to something relevant in a student’s life to show them the importance of a historical event. Thinking outside the box and connecting with students is a common method we share with schools in our community. The South Bay School Districts all have a mission to “strive for academic excellence by forming partnerships with the community.” Study Hut enjoys working with schools and students to be part of this partnership in promoting confidence and academic success in our schools.
Today’s students are expected to have a much more comprehensive understanding of their subject matter, especially in mathematics and science.
It’s not enough to know what the components of DNA are anymore. High school Biology students are expected to how the different building blocks fit together and why. For a lot of students, the sheer volume of information flying at them daily is more than overwhelming.
Study Hut helps students navigate these murky waters by providing the kind of thorough and interactive support that allows students to take control of their own learning.
“Give a man fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you’ll feed him for a lifetime.” ~ Chinese Proverb
More than just providing what students need from day to day, our tutors teach their students both the skills to be self-sufficient and the confidence essential to managing those unavoidable high-stress situations.
We also help them develop study techniques that take advantage of their already sizeable knowledge base and learning strengths.
You like comic books? Let’s connect your vocabulary words to Marvel characters.
You like the ocean? Let’s relate that back to what you’re learning in Chemistry.
Ariella is your typical studious teen. She’s got eclectic music taste and her own hip sense of fashion. She’s a sophomore at Mira Costa High School and she’s currently acing quiz after quiz and test after test in her Algebra II class. Of course, nothing about this is unusual for a student that’s been receiving tutoring from Study Hut for any lengthy amount of time. However, in order to fully appreciate Ariella’s story, we need to go back.
Her story starts all the way back in November of Two Thousand and Ten. Gas was under four dollars per gallon and the young women of Manhattan Beach had found the anthem they’d been waiting for in “California Girls.” It was at this time that I started tutoring Ariella. If you’re thinking that November of 2010 wasn’t that long ago, you’re right. Just four months ago, Ariella was in over her head with imaginary numbers and complex conjugates. She was struggling to keep her head above water and her highest grades would be sung in the key of D.
When a new student starts at Study Hut, all hands are on deck. As tutors we serve as medics on the front line of battle just trying to get the rapid grade hemorrhage under control. For Ariella, this meant we needed to diagnose her issues with Algebra, assess her study habits, and quickly sum up every important math concept up until that point, before we could make further progress. Just a few short weeks after our reoccurring sessions started, Ariella got a C on a math test. Here’s a direct quote from my tutor notes at the time:
“On her last math test, she got a C. This is great, considering she got mostly Ds and Fs before.”
Normally, we aim much higher than Cs at Study Hut. However, this C was a point of celebration for Ariella and I. It marked the turnaround in her math career. The hemorrhage had stopped. Now we could really focus on marching forward; attacking difficult concepts before they became an issue. Ariella stepped up to the challenge.
Cut all the way back to modern day, just three short months since that C, and Ariella just scored a 19 out of 20 on her last quiz and a 47 out of 50 on her last math test. After a series of incremental victories, we’re now celebrating scores that represent an A average in her math class.
I cannot stress enough how great of a turnaround this student has made. Ariella went from feeling like math just “isn’t [her] thing,” to being an expert in the same material. She can condense and expand the most complex of logarithmic equations. She can simplify a radical and solve rational functions without breaking a sweat. She has become the latest example of the time-tested Hut tradition:
Show up and we’ll get you from awful to average. Put in the work and we’ll get you from average to A. Just ask Ariella.
One-on-one tutoring has many advantages over group tutoring. One-on-one tutoring is more focused and versatile than group tutoring. With group tutoring, tutors focus on more general concepts. They often have to teach material some of the students already understand. Its hard for the tutor to explain the concepts in a way each student can understand. With one-on-one tutoring, the tutor can develop a study plan to strengthen the students’ weaknesses . If the student is having trouble understanding a concept, the tutor can spend more time explaining the concept in a way that the student can understand. The tutor also helps to build an infrastructure for studying at home that best suits the student own preferences for learning. Students can also get help with more than one subject with one-on-one tutoring. If they have and a math and a chemistry test the next day, but feel strongly on about math, they can quickly go through the math concepts that aren’t understood and spend the rest of the time focusing on chemistry.
One on one tutoring keeps students focused and engaged in the lesson, allowing the students to use their time more efficiently. When in groups, many kids are overly self-conscious of what their peers think. They do not ask as many question and they do not engage in the conversation for the fear of feeling stupid or being laughed at. As many teachers would contest, students are also more likely to get distracted by their friends and engage in side conversations. One-on-one tutoring cuts out these distractions, giving students more bang for their buck.
Another benefit of one-on-one tutoring is that each student can choose a tutor that best suits his or her liking. The session is a lot more enjoyable and more can be accomplished if the if the student likes the person who is tutoring him/her. The students will stay more focused on their work rather than how much they dislike the tutor.
Yesterday was a busy Thursday. In fact, every school week there is a busy Thursday, whether you come to Study Hut Tutoring or not. With tests and quizzes, homework and projects, six classes of papers going in and out of the backpack everyday and all your friends jammed into one classroom, the task of managing a workload is impossible. Am I right? Let us take a quick look of how this impossible situation appears when our 8th grader Corey sits down for his tutoring hour. Corey is a very sharp student who is able to breeze through his pre-algebra assignments. He is very capable in other areas too. He is maintaining a strong grade in social studies, however, his grades dont reflect his intelligence.
So what is the matter? What do we do? How can we bump up these “C” grades up if Corey doesn’t need help with the actual subject matter? Lucky for Corey, the Study Hut knows exactly what to do. After speaking with his mom, I know she is frustrated with Corey’s sluggish performance around the house. So now Corey is at Study Hut, sitting down with me. The first thing I do is look at his daily planner. It is a bad sign when the whole thing is blank. The planner is the tool that fosters accountability, so if the planner is blank, Corey isn’t even accountable with himself, let alone with parents, teachers, and his tutor. The next step is manually going through the backpack. This is crucial to set the record straight and explain the reasoning and utility of behind using the daily planner.
After all, why do something if it doesn’t serve a greater purpose, save time, or help in the short term and in the long term. Young students are no different. You would never do a lot of things the right way if there was no direct or indirect benefit. After digging through every subject and organizing the folder, we see that there is a pile of old, completed work that can go into a folder and can be stashed away at home in the closet. The other pile was larger than I would like. This pile had a ton of incomplete work. Our plan from here on out at home everyday and at tutoring is as follows:
1)Write in the planner for every subject, during each class period, every week.
2) take notes each class period, everyday
3) make a list prior to tutoring of what we will be working on at Study Hut, and what will still have to be done at home.
4) Make one study tool (flashcards, outline, study guide, practice test) for each class each week.
5) show all of this to the tutor to remain accountable during bi-weekly tutoring sessions.
These simple tasks will, and have already started to, pull grades up, increase accountability, and lead to domination.
When attending middle school, organization is key to success, and that is why we focus a lot of our energy on the implementation of organizational skills. Assuring students’ backpacks are clean and folders have dividers are ways we aid in promoting the success of our students. We try to incorporate good habits while the students are young so they can really utilize these skills as they get older. As students grow, so does their workload, and organization only becomes that much more important with age. Read the rest of this entry »
American and British Literature
Approaching a piece of literature may intimidate a student, just because the assignment is enormous. English assignments don’t come with simple equations and formulas. Read the rest of this entry »
