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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1st week

After emailing the Math Rules! volunteers, I've gotten a few responses on how the first few sessions/first week went. Most of the responses I've gotten were positive, things going as smoothly as first days go. Many of our volunteers will be starting this current week so I can put up more responses of 1st sessions next week.

One of our volunteers did have a question about keeping students focused in their session. Here are excerpts from my reply. Please keep in mind I'm not a professional tutor/educator and only offered advice based on my previous tutoring experiences.
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"Keeping kids focused is definitely a big part of the volunteer experience. I have found that a little bit of competition is healthy to keep them focused. And if competition is not quite what you're looking for, you can ask them to help each other out. For example, "Mary could you help Joe put his shapes together?" You could also try refocusing the entire group together, "Let's all look at Annie's tetromino."

The great thing about the math curriculum now is that it focuses on group work and building off other students' ideas to help them with their work. Make sure you ask open ended questions that build off of the previous one. I've learned that these questions are called spiraling questions that start off with very basic questions that make sure everyone is on the same page. Sometimes these basic questions may frustrate more advanced students, but math terminology is important to understanding math concepts.

I think that it takes some time for [the tutor] to understand how best to motivate your kids. It also depends on their personalities quite a bit. It's hard to prepare everyone for real-world volunteering during [Math Rules!] training. If focusing becomes a bigger problem throughout the year, I would ask your teachers for ideas and suggestions."