Personal Narrative: Tuesday Night Tutoring

At the start of high school, I learned that all students at my school were expected to perform sixty hours of community service before graduating. I hoped that my time would be well used, and that I could create a noticeable difference in someone else's life.

I had always thought of myself as good with kids, so I decided to try participate in Tuesday Night Tutoring, a program hosted by my school aimed at helping children to read. I naively believed that I could give them a few tips I used when I first learned to read, and at the same time help them to absorb some information from the practice readings, but reality fell very far short of my hopes. I struggled both to convince the children that they were mispronouncing several words and that my pronunciations were any better, and my efforts to explain the meaning of various words only necessitated additional definitions. If they believed me, the children would usually forget everything within a week. I continued trying for almost twenty hours of reading tutoring,
but I had to acknowledge that I was not making much of an impact.

After looking for another community service opportunity, I decided to offer my services as a math tutor to three elementary schools near me. The first two never responded, but the third school, John Eaton Elementary School, was willing to give me a chance. John Eaton had a pre-existing, albeit understaffed, after school math tutoring program, and just three teachers had to deal with 30 students. Most of them needed personal attention, so they were glad to have an extra pair of helping hands to provide the needed individual focus. This time, my tutoring was far more successful.

Mindful of my failures with Tuesday Night Tutoring, I was initially careful to find out how much a student could learn at once, preventing the information overload that occurred during my earlier tutoring experience.
In addition, by quizzing the students on what I taught them the week before, their natural desire to impress helped them keep focused while learning and retain their information. For example, a third grader, Diana, was struggling to remember her multiplication facts, especially those involving multiples of seven, eight, and nine. She was never really motivated to learn them, so I challenged her to tell me at the start of the next lesson what eight times nine was. It took a few weekly reminders before she got it, but to my joy, she yelled out seventy-two when she saw me one week later, before I even asked. By repeating this every week with more multiplication facts, Diana was able to complete a multiplication table within a month of
learning.

Although my experience with Tuesday Night Tutoring was unsuccessful if looked at in isolation, and my inability to tutor children in reading dealt a bit of a blow to my ego, my later efforts of tutoring at John Eaton would have been far less successful without the initial experience. I learned that a student can only take in so much new information at a time before being overloaded, and that they need frequent refreshers on recently absorbed information in order to retain it. But more importantly, I also was reminded that I should take advantage of my strengths, in this case my aptitude for math. As much as it pained me at the time to put so much time into a goal without an initial reward, I am grateful that it enabled me to do over fifty hours of truly useful work.