Students
We work with students at a Job Corps Center, but that may not tell you much. I am going to extract a few descriptions from the tutors and mentors that have been shared on the Stories page. This will help you to better understand the people we are working with (and the people we are.)
From a Math Tutor:
If you are inquisitive about what the average STARS math student needs, let me put together some typical profiles. Most do not have high school diplomas, and have been out of school for a few years, and have thus lost most of the math they once knew.
Then you will get students with high school diplomas that cannot pass the basic TABE (Testing Adult Basic Education) competency test, let alone the GED test. Many HS grads cannot qualify at the 10th grade math competency level.
I have put these common profiles together based on many prior students, and won’t mention any names, but give it a read, and I hope it shows you what is needed.
Student 1(typical new student):
Does not know their multiplication tables. Finger-flipping is the normal means of doing basic addition and multiplication. These strudents waste almost all of their time in taking TABE and GED tests just doing the basic computational processes needed for any higher math problems, and often cant solve them because 7 x 6 does not give them 42. Be prepared for patience, as they progress.
Student 2.
Does not understand how to convert a fraction to a decimal or percent. Aso needs help in how to reduce fractions to their lowest level. A majority falll in this category, but they pick up the concepts quickly.
Student 3.
Needs basic geometry skills. What is a perimeter? What is area? What is pi? And the hardest thing, how to calculate the area of a triangle!
Student 4.
This student is very bright, and has put time into learning the basic math skills,l but has a problem in then applying them to word problems. Student 4 suffers from poor English comprehension. Many STARS students are immigrants, and thus have English comperhension programs, so be prepared to work on word problem comprehension.
Student 5.
This sudent is the exeption for most math tutoring. He or she has a basic understand of working with whole and decimal numbers and fractions, and is ready to move into the more abstract world of algebra, and learn how to deal with variables. This is needed for both TABE and GED. Algebra skills include only one-varibable equations, and simple linear equations, at the most basic level. What is slope of a linear equation, and how does one plot points on a graph. Complete plotting and graphing of linear equations is not normally a part of TABE or GED.
From an Literacy Tutor:
I am a volunteer tutor for the STARS program at the Woodland Job Corps center. The students I work with all need help with reading. Many of the young people here have gaps in their education. These gaps might have occurred because of changing schools frequently during the very important grades where reading and math fundamentals are taught. In other cases, the students may not have attended school at all for long stretches of time during their growing up years. Some of our students are new to English and must acquire very basic literacy skills.
Whatever the reason for their academic difficulties, the students in the tutoring program at STARS are eager to catch up. They want to do well in a trade, and they realize that they need to be able to read no matter what trade they choose.
It is a brave young person who realizes how far behind he/she is and is eager to improve. Sometimes the students I work with have to go all the way back to learning the letters of the alphabet. Others may be able to read the words in a passage but not fully understand the meaning of the passage. Some of the more advanced students need help with writing or preparing for SAT’s. In other words, our students have a wide range of abilities.
There is an expression often used by literacy tutors, “If you can read, you can help someone else read.”
I will share a very simple student profile update.
In my tutoring this week, I had a session with Ms. D.
Dividing 25 by 8 was our initial session of review on how to do basic division, and of mulitplication tables. She stumbled.
It was as basic as one could tutor in math. But that is more the norm than the exception.
Ms. D needed a lot of help at first in reviewing her basic division skills.
But by the end of the session, she was dividing any number I gave her by any other number.
My point is that I saw progress!
That is the joy of tutoring. Slow progress, but you see it each session.
Six months from now, I hope that we can lead Ms. D to a GED.
One step at a time, but most students need one-on-one tutoring to get then there.
That, my freinds, is what STARS means to me. One step.
Another new student, who I will call Ms. Renovated.
Believe it or not, Ms Renovated knew her multiplication tables backwards and forwards! Only we we tutors know the joy of that simple math building block!
Ms. Renovated was in a major auto accident in her 9th grade of high school, and missed her last three years. When you are off the math bicycle for three years, you forget how to pedal.
In my first tutoring session with Ms. Renovated, she was a bit shy, not wanting to expose what she did not know. So the first part of my session was trying to use my mentoring, as opposed my pure math, tutoring.
Once I built her trust that I did not care what she did not know, I only cared about what I could help her to learn, it was clear sailing.
Whenever we go over a topic, and she gets it, what I get back is the biggest smile. That smile, with words unspoken, says thanks to me, and makes my time precious, and Revovates me!
I had the chance to chat with a brand new Job Corp enrollee this week, and we began chatting about his goals. He told me he wanted to be an engineer. It told him that I was an aerospece engineer, and his jaw dropped! WOW! Really? Talking to a real engineer! LOL!
Circumstances only permitted us to chat for five minutes. But I saw his quest for more. So I gave him the three minute sales pitch on what he coud get from this thing called the STARS program, if he would only make a commitment to being tutored and mentored.
He was over in Ms. Coliton’s office the next day, and is now on the growing waiting list to become one of the STARS at Job Corps.
It is also a brave volunteer who realizes the need.
My dad was a high school dropout. He was always embarassed about that. His son in college, and yet he was not even a high school grad. I tutored him on the front porch of our home when I was only 13 years old. He needed his GED for his next promotion as a plumber. I helped him get that. He was promoted, and so was I.
It was the proudest moment of my young life.