Compounded mentoring moments

I guess the school year has gotten into that slump where there isn't anything drastically new to report from my volunteer/tutor sessions, so today I'll be talking about how I've developed mentor relationships that start from "mentoring moments" as our Executive Director calls them.

This came up for a number of reasons. Yesterday I went to an info session about my AmeriCorps program, the Massachusetts Promise Fellowship, a service program that partners with Northeastern University and focuses on serving youth across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Fellow projects range from developing after-school programs, providing educational support, developing youth leadership and work-related skills, training youth workers, to free college financial aid guidance, and other youth related projects.

One of my fellow Fellows asked the question, "After our year of service, how do we let go of our youth?" I almost started crying right then and there because I thought about the youth I had grown to love and care for; having to say goodbye would kill me. It's interesting because there are certain students that I would not (and could not) say goodbye to, while there have been other individuals in my life who did not evoke the same upswell of emotions and tears as these students. Some of these kids I've known for a little over a year, and others I've only met this year. But as a collective, I've really come to enjoy working with and seeing these different groups of kids weekly.

For the new students I've only met this year, it was tough to start off a year not knowing what to expect and knowing very little about their situations that led them to our tutoring partnerships. But as time goes on, we've built relationships slowly from week to week. At first the students were wary of me being in the classroom at all, but I notice a little excitement when I come for tutoring. The students jump out of their seats and say hi to me. The other students I don't work with look towards our group questioningly, and in some cases, they come right over and ask to work with us.

I'm pretty sure it's the consistency that really helps tutoring and mentoring relationships. Sometimes it's a matter of personality matching as well, but for me, I've had good relationships with the students I'm working with. The kids (myself included) really look foward to working together every week on our scheduled day. There was a point where I had to switch my schedule around, and the kids questioned me "Don't you come on X day?" I've also gotten to a place where the students work so well that we have extra time to chat and get to know each other beyond the math, or their schoolwork.

The "mentoring moments" were originally used in the context of the Big Cheese Reads (BCR) program at Boston Partners in Education. The BCR program asks for community, government, corporate, and public figures to come into a middle school classroom and read an inspirational and student relevant short story or excerpt. Afterwards, the Big Cheese Readers talk about their experiences growing up, getting work experience, and how they got to where they are now. The BCReaders also field questions from students taht range from "How do you get an internship?" to "What's your favorite TV show?" The Big Cheese Reads program is a mentoring moment where students are exposed to a life they may not get to glimpse into, and hopefully learn and grow from it.

I've taken the phrase to apply to my weekly meetings with my different students. There are weeks where we don't have a chance to talk about subjects other than math. And there are weeks where the students don't really feel like talking at all. On some level, I don't really feel like a true mentor who guides young people through difficult lifestages and turning points. Sometimes I feel more like just an academic tutor, however, there are those moments when I feel like I've really made a difference, or that I've expanded their world a little bit just by talking frankly about something. I notice these passing moments when it's significant to me, but I wouldn't be surprised if my students have many more of these significant moments when they learn something about me, the world, or themselves.

And to be honest, I don't have enough time to get to know these young people enough. I always want more! Last year, I was fortunate to go to MathSTARS twice a week, but this year I only have time for once a week. If things were up to me, I would go all four days a week. Every week, I only manage to speak one-on-one with a handful of the kids, but it's the little things and the short conversations that add up to make me so darn emotional!

Sometimes I think, "Did I really help these kids today with their work?" but sometimes it doesn't matter so much. It matters that I was there when they were expecting me. At the meeting yesterday, one of my fellow Fellows said that she got an email from a youth she had worked with years before and she didn't realize how much of an impact she had made until she got the email. In the now, it's hard to gauge how much your presence is making a difference, but in the long run, I hope these kids will remember me and our time together. I know I'll look back fondly on this year of service, and the students I worked with.


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Student juggling

I managed to work with three different students on Tuesday at MathSTARS and all three students got a significant amount of work done, which is amazing! I don't really know how it happened, but I started on a physics lab with C and we got halfway through before she got bored with it and moved on to other homework.



In the meantime, I switched and worked with V on his math packet. He's a very sharp boy and knows his math fairly well, but he has serious focus issues. We worked through it, I think he's warming up to me pretty well because it took a lot less effort to get him to focus. We also had a very nice and lengthy conversation about tattoos, family, his friends, and his future career (he wants to fix cars and planes and eventually buy a $15 million plane someday).

C came back over and gave me a hard time saying that I had "abandoned-ed" her to work with V. We have an interesting relationship where she teases me endlessly. C and I then worked on her Romeo and Juliet homework which basically meant I sat and watched her do her homework. These kids are so smart that sometimes they just want and need extra attention from the MathSTARS tutors.

The last student I worked with was J. He has consistently had attention difficulties and gives us all a run for our money. It's really hard to get him to focus, and he ended reading National Geographic magazines for the Tuesday session. The afterschool director Ms. D gave him a two question assignment to summarize and explain an article in the NatGeo. He hadn't started writing at all, so Ms. D suggested I write while he dictates. It was somewhat frustrating to get him to sit still and talk to me about the article, but once he got started, it was tough to keep up with him.


Then we played Apples to Apples. It was a good day at MathSTARS.

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Giving them space

Another great day at the Sportsmens' Tennis Club and MathSTARS. I find there are very few days that I don't enjoy at MathSTARS. The students are such great kids, hard working students, and very dynamic personalities.

I sat in the quiet room yesterday just to mix things up a bit. The quiet room is the designated room for people who don't want loud music or distracting conversation. Students who need the quiet are encouraged to study in the quiet room and enforce the level of quiet they need. For a while, the quiet room had a "no talking at all" rule, but that quickly changed when the students voted otherwise.

It's interesting because the quiet room definitely has a different vibe and flow to it. Most of the students who use it go to socialize more than do their work, but yesterday I found the students who had homework were very productive. O, N, and A stayed in the room most of the time, so I'll talk about my interactions with them in this post.

I was surprised to come into MathSTARS yesterday and O waved to me enthusiastically. We haven't worked that closely on his homework in the past, but being waved to and acknowledged made me feel really good. He's a very social young man with his peers and friends, but definitely enjoys and needs independence in his homework. I've rarely seen him working closely with another tutor, so sitting in the quiet room, he did his work by himself and finished pretty quickly.

N is one of my favorite students. I know we're not supposed to have favorites, but she's definitely up there. She's a very strong leader, mostly positive, and very silly. She didn't have much homework either, so she decided to paint her nails instead, which is all right by me and the afterschool director. She was also helping her friend A with homework on imaginary numbers and the quadratic formula (which I have regretfully forgotten...) so that was very helpful of her.


The last student is A, who is new to MathSTARS this year, and we've bonded over several weeks. I think we connect so well because she reminds me of myself a little bit. She's a very caring girl who is quiet more often than not, but is quick to laugh and joke around. She's also quite hardworking and gets her homework done pretty much every time I've worked with her.

I think the best part of yesterday was that when N stepped out of the room, A come over to ask me for help. She approached me! In the MathSTARS tutoring world, this is huge! She was working on imaginary numbers (which I told the kids is practially useless in the real world) and the quadratic formula, good ol' algebra. I managed to struggle through and asked A to re-explain the quadratic formula to me, which worked out well. She retaught me something then I helped her through the rest of the problem.

At one point she missed a simple computation and I called her out on it. "-7 + 2? Where'd you get that -4 from?" Sometimes I worry that questioning their answers is detrimental to the tutor-tutee relationship, but I think it's better for the students to get the right answer and to remember to check their work.

What was so great about the session yesterday was that I sat at my own table and started a craft project while the three of them were working. I was semi listening in to their conversation and concentrating on my project at the same time. I think middle school students need that space to dictate their own work pace. I've noticed hovering and imposing oneself onto this age group ends negatively. It's tough though because when I was starting out as a tutor at MathSTARS, that's all I wanted to do, was to ask the students what they were working on and if I could help or sit with them and work along with them. Some students need the tutor to initiate while other students will ask for help when they need it, but need their space when they don't need help.

I think the MathSTARS format is unique in that way. Students don't have a matched tutor, they can choose to work with any number of tutors who come, or they don't work with a tutor at all. It allows the tutors and the students lots of flexibility in who everyone is working with from week to week. Sometimes this is great, I get to work with lots of different students. But sometimes it's harder to build a strong one-on-one relationship with "your" student.

Either way, I love my time at MathSTARS. Yesterday I managed to crack some jokes the kids really enjoyed. We were laughing so loud the other room had to run in to check on us, we had a good time.

MathSTARS, strength-based approach

So I've been volunteering with an organization called MathPower that has an afterschool math tutoring program called MathSTARS that provides tutoring and mentoring help for middle school students in the Boston area. I've been volunteering for almost a year and go in once a week to help any students who need help.

Yesterday I got to work with a young man, B, whom I hadn't interacted with much and we worked on an exponent problem. While the work and being able to focus was difficult, I was surprised at the non-academic aspects of our time together. From out of the blue, he told me a story about another student who got hurt because of his friends and he was concerned for her and also wondering what he should tell his friends. It was interesting for several reasons: he approached me about it, he showed genuine concern for the injured student, and he had a conflict about his friends' behaviors. After talking to the afterschool director, she told me that he trusted me enough to talk to me about it.

I also attended a MathSTARS tutor training in the evening called the Strength Based Approach to working with students which basically boiling down to using what you know and what you learn about a student to connect to what kind of individual they are and what they can do in the future with such strengths and qualities. Sometimes we forget that mentoring relationships mean that both sides are learning and growing in some way.

In the previous example, I told B that he was a very caring person for walking the injured student to the nurse. Of course, middle school students don't express themselves as easily as younger students, but I think and hope that B appreciated hearing that he's a caring person. I think we don't hear about our own good qualities enough, but at MathSTARS we really try to incorporate it into everything we do.

The student also asked me what he should say to his friends about the situation, and he said that it was messed up that they had gotten her injured. He had the answer and said it to me right there, so I pointed that out, "You could just say what you said to me." It seems like most of the time, we all know what we really want to say but having a sounding board helps encourage us that we were right all along.

I did link the situation and story back to what kind of person B is, but I hadn't been through the Strength-Based Approach and didn't link it to how his concern would be useful in the future. I hope more of these situations will come up in the future so I can try to use the approach.