I was a tutor at Champion Learning Center from mid-February to late June 2011.
Well, actually, that’s not technically true since Champion Learning Center considered us tutors as “Independent Contractors.” This was their loophole so that we couldn’t be unionized, so that they didn’t have to worry about affording any sort of benefits for the tutoring staff, so they didn’t have to hire human resources staff to figure out our taxes and the like. What it meant for such tutors like me was that except for actually figuring out which students were eligible and wanting our services (out program managers handled that aspect by assigning us tutees living close to our residences), we tutors had to do everything related to tutoring a student. We called the parent/guardian of the student to schedule tutoring sessions. In addition, t was our duty to fill out, scan, and fax/e-mail all the necessary paperwork involved with the tutoring.
The one great thing about being an “Independent Contractor” was that I could schedule the tutoring sessions to be what was convenient for me. Moreover, if I ever felt too sick to tutor or even just wasn’t in the mood to go out and tutor, I could simply call the student and cancel the session that day. I never liked canceling a session or even having to reschedule a session but I will admit honestly that I did end up doing that a good number of times, especially for those students who tended to cancel their sessions frequently. There was always this crutch to use whenever I didn’t feel too motivated.
Like with any job of course, the biggest motivator was the pay. As this sort of tutor, I was paid $15 per hour I tutored a student. I was never paid for the time I spent scheduling the sessions, commuting to my tutees’ homes, nor for the time I spent on completing the NYC Department of Education paperwork. I was simply paid only for the hours I actually tutored a student. The other aspects of the job were just supposed to be considered as expected parts of the job. This always bummed me out, as completing the paperwork was always so time-consuming and tedious. It was understandable however since there would be no way for Champion Learning Center to verify whether the tutors were being honest or not about the time they supposedly spent doing the paperwork.
I was told during the interview for this job position that the bulk of the funding for Champion Learning Center came from the No Child Left Behind legislation. As such, there were bureaucratic rules to abide by. For one, students eligible for the services of Champion Learning Center were those in designated failing school, and those who were eligible for free lunches or reduced price lunches. For these students Champion Learning Center could provide thirty hours of tutoring per year for free. Each student would be provided with at least two sessions per week with each session usually amounting to two hours. Once a student received those thirty hours of supplemental education, the student was considered as a graduate of the program, at least for that year.
Champion Learning Center also had to work under NYC Department of Education Guidelines. This is why I as an independent contractor tutor had so much paperwork to deal with. The paperwork to record included: student sign-in sheet, daily log, Supplemental Education Plan (SEP), Student Progress Reports, and pre-test/post-test scores.
Every time I met with a student as a tutor, I had to have the student and his/her parent/guardian sign the time I arrived and left. That sign-in sheet was filled out just to verify that I was there tutoring. It was to hold the tutor accountable for his/her hours of service. The daily log served a similar purpose and the additional requirement of the tutor writing down what occurred in each tutoring session and commenting how the student is doing.
The SEP and Progress Reports are official NYC Department of Education documents. Both are filled out online, printed, signed by parent/guardian of the student, then either faxed back to DOE or scanned and e-mailed to DOE. SEP is filled out after the very first tutoring session with the student. The tutor is supposed to select up to five topic areas (per subject) that he/she feels student needs improvement in. There’s a huge list of topic areas to select, especially for any mathematical subject. Each item feels very specific and so I always found it weird that I can only select up to five. Another limitation is that SEP only includes English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics subjects (e.g. 7th Grade Math, Trigonometry, Algebra, etc) as educational subjects. The SEP proved to be just a bureaucratic paperweight when I tutored other subjects. For instance, I had to selected various topic areas in High School ELA and in Geometry, even though I was actually tutoring Earth Science and American History.
From then on, four Progress Reports are expected to be filled out, signed, and returned to DOE, one for every three tutoring sessions. These documents simply contained the topical areas selected in SEP and the tutor’s job was to mark whether the student “Needed Improvement,” was “Approaching Proficiency” or was “Proficient” in those areas. As mentioned, when I was tutoring students subjects that were not ELA or math, the progress reports were unnecessary paperwork, but required to be done nonetheless.
I could understand why these guidelines are put in place, but in my experience as a tutor, they were what I had to tolerate and work as best I could despite of, instead of things that could help me tutor better. Scanning the signed forms and e-mailing them back was the most time-consuming part of the job. The other option of faxing the forms back wasn’t any better either. The worst part of the guidelines was the fact that each student could only be provided thirty hours of tutoring per year.
Actually, that’s not true. Each student were provided only twenty-six hours of tutoring per school year. This is because pre-tests and post-tests must be administered for the student. The first tutoring session with the student always involved the pre-test. Tutors are required to administer this as DOE demands that tutors record their pre-test/post-test scores. The first pages of the tutoring workbooks are the pre-tests. For students being tutored in Regents’ Exam subjects such as Algebra, Geometry, Physics and such, twenty-five questions from the previously published Regents’ exams can be chosen to test the student. The post-test should be administered some time before the final session, but this has to be done.
I understand the reasoning for this as well. It’s to determine the student’s capability and to see whether the tutoring services helped the student or not and if it did, by how much. Still, thirty hours is up far too quickly to really help improve a student and so to lessen those hours by requiring the administration of these tests is rather frustrating.
That’s not to say thirty hours is nothing. I’ve witnessed a great improvement in a few students I’ve come to tutor at their 30th hour.
One student I’m really proud of having tutored is a kindergartener who barely knew the Alphabets and numbers when I first met him. He was also very resistance to me tutoring him. In his mind – and understandably so – he had enough of learning and schooling in his kindergarten. At home he wanted nothing to do with any learning-related thing. He just wanted to play on his DSi that his grandmother gave him.
The kindergartener and I also started off on a bad impression. I had come to the house dressed in suit and tie.The company’s dress code (for men) only stressed that tutors don’t wear T-shirts and flip-flops but I still liked going to my students’ homes dressed professionally. I always wanted to express to my students that I respected enough to take the time and effort to dress professionally. Being in a suit instead of in shirt and Jeans also set the tone of the session, that I was there as their motivating tutor, ready to work hard and as professionally as I can, not to be their friend nor lazy. Those were my intentions but the moment the kindergartener saw me in that suit, he fled to his mom and started wailing, thinking that I was his doctor. He had gotten a flu shot recently and so he thought his doctor was making a visit to his home, here to give him another shot.
That’s how our tutoring session began and it definitely was not easy. I didn’t come to his home in suits anymore but he still resisted fervently. It usually took about thirty to forty minutes for him to stop crying and start doing some learning activities with me. His mom tried to bribe him with gum, going “Quiere chiqle?” I was so surprised that he could go on so long crying. It was real crying too, fading out to a whimper for a while, tears just flowing out of his eyes and then him back to crying real loud again. His mom ultimately wanted to reschedule our sessions to occur on Fridays and Sundays, the days when his father was home. I personally didn’t think that was necessary since all his father really did was yell, but in a way I guess his presence did help.
My kindergartener student would cry for about thirty minutes but eventually I could get him to start coloring some things. I tried many different things in different sessions, having him play memory games with alphabet letters, doing math activities with crayons, etc. He would then be with me on the same page for about forty minutes, an hour if I’m lucky and then he would get very, very talkative for the last thirty minutes of the session, trying to divert my attention to something else. That was his second way of resisting. I was always open to his distraction but tried as best as I can to then divert his attention back to the learning material as quickly as I can. I would show him a picture of a frog to teach the sound of the letter “f” and he would nod and try to talk about the pet lizard in one of his school classrooms. I would acknowledge it, point how similar a lizard is to a frog to get him to learn the f sound really well and then skip to the letter L sound of the lizard. He was constantly fighting passively to not learn and I in turn was constantly doing everything I can so he would learn. I gave him five-minute breaks here and there of course, knowing that a young student’s attention span is very short, but for the most part, I spent most of those two hours trying to “tutor” him things.
Ultimately, by the time he “graduated” from the Champion Learning Center program that year, he knew how to add two numbers togethers as long as each number was less than five, and he knew how to read aloud good many three-letter and four-letter words. He could also write his name. I don’t want to take the credit for the progress because I assume his time at in kindergarten was probably much more effective for him, but I feel proud when I reminisce about tutoring him. Even if he hadn’t progressed so much, I think I would still be proud of having tutored him, proud at least proud at least that I was able to handle his resistance as well as I could. One of the most notable things I did coming up with this rewards system in which if he participated in learning with me, I would give him stickers. If he had accrued enough stickers, I promised to buy him a gift. I ended up buying him three gifts throughout my experience of tutoring him- an I Spy book, play dough, and Mario Kart DS game.
Experiences like this taught me a lot and if I was to continue tutoring, I would still be learning. I would be learning how to make learning the Alphabets fun, how to transform the surrounding environment into a learning playground. My kindergartener student responded best to visual and physical cues and as I noticed from how his parents tried to motivate him, he was much more receptive to the promise of rewards than to threats. On that note, I actually realized for the first time, that negative consequences or at least even just the threat of negative consequences must be utilized as well. The incentive to accrue stickers was not complete without my authority to invalidate stickers if he misbehaved or was non-compliant.
I think I was very lucky with this kindergarten student in many other respects though. For one, he was in a great learning environment with a caring stay-at-home mother and a father who was actively present when off from work. He had three siblings – a younger brother, and two older sisters. I was particularly lucky because I was also tutoring his two older sisters. The sisters often acted as my little helpers, calming the kindergarten student when he got into his tantrums and making sure to review the learning materials with him when I went back home. I have to wonder how my tutoring would have turned out if I wasn’t tutoring his sisters also.
Learning how to tutor as I tutor is a given of course, but for me tutoring was actually learning as well. This was especially true as I tutored older students. When I tutored Physics and Trigonometry to a 12th grader, I found myself spending my free time at home or in a public library brushing up again on materials I’ve struggled myself as a high school student. Physics was especially challenging because I had forgotten almost everything about it. There were shamefully a number of times when a student and I both got stumped on a question and I had to resort to, “I’ll look into it and you should ask your teacher about this when you get a chance.” I was always honest to the student, saying that I haven’t studied physics since I was an 11th grader in high school. She was very nice about it and tried her best, but I always felt that I didn’t know my materials as well I should, me being her tutor and all.
As a tutor, I’ve come to realize that the work hours of an educator aren’t really defined. Even after finishing that tutoring sessions and having come home, I may still often need to take some time to assess the student’s progress and prepare for future tutoring sessions. Same would be true for a teacher in an established school. Just because an educator has finished presenting the lesson plan and has come back home doesn’t mean that the job is finished. There are still quizzes remaining to be graded, supplies and gifts to buy, future lesson plans to pen up, and if necessary, concepts and problems to study and be proficient at. I wasn’t always able to prepare as much as I could for a student (damn you Netflix and video games for being such good distractors), but I always tried to spend at least four hours a week total to prepare for the upcoming tutoring sessions.
I had become close to the families of these students and so I wanted to establish a good reputation as a tutor and maintain it. I didn’t want to be one of those other Champion Learning Center tutors I’ve heard about, those tutors that came late to the session late and left an hour earlier than they were supposed to, or those that didn’t really tutor but only had the student solve problems on the workbook and calling that a tutoring session. I have no idea how many such “tutors” there were in the program, but it’s not a far-fetched idea; with how Champion Learning Center system works, it’s certainly easy to abuse the system by not really tutoring and get away with a paycheck every two weeks. As long as a parent/guardian of the student signed the sign-in sheet, the tutor could log those hours into the Champion Learning online portal and that was that.
One of the students I was assigned to tutor had actually been exploited by a Champion Learning Center tutor in this manner. The parent told me that the tutor had often cancelled the tutoring sessions the day of the session, and when she actually came, all she did as a tutor was have the student silently try to solve problems on the company workbooks. After three such tutoring sessions, the parent called the Champion Learning Center and complained. A week after the complaint had gone through, my program manager called me to ask me if I could accept being assigned to tutor this student.
Tutoring her was an incredible challenge. In the end it was a rewarding challenge, but still a very frustrating and hair-pulling challenge nonetheless. This was a student I had been assigned to tutor because her previous tutor was faulted for always canceling the sessions and yet ironically, when I started tutoring her, it was often the student herself who either was unavailable or unable to make the tutoring session. The issue was her living environment, which was far too messy and chaotic for her to focus on the study materials. She had five siblings running about, not to mention two large dogs who weren’t properly potty-trained, and the 1-year-old son of his older 18-year-old brother. Also, with her mom at work until midnight, there was no real order in the house. My student acted as the mother figure of the house, being the second oldest sibling, and the oldest female figure of the family. This family environment itself was so intoxicating that at times I could understand why her previous tutor had cancelled her sessions so much.
The biggest issue however was the fact that my student was not going to school. She told me how she’s always been a smart studious student, never missing a day of school, always getting her homework done, and usually doing great on quizzes and tests. That all changed last year when her family moved and she had to change schools. Separated from her older school friends, and placed into classes with teachers she did not care for, she stopped caring about school and stopped going to school pretty much altogether. I was lucky if I asked, “when did you last go to school?” and her answer was, “Last week?”
Champion Learning Center told me she needed tutoring assistance in high school ELA and Geometry and while it was true that she was fairly weak in these areas, she was actually preparing to take the Regent’s exams on Earth Science and U.S. History. The past three tutoring sessions for her were therefore a waste of time. I quickly obtained Barron’s study book on Earth Science and Princeton Review’s AP U.S. History flashcards and made sure to go to her house twice a week every week, although half the time I went, she wasn’t at home. When she was at home, she was extremely tired, which turned out to be because she was anemic. Her fatigue was something I could usually work with, but I was always so struck with how below average her knowledge base was. She was in 11th grade, but her vocabulary was probably at an 8th grade level, making it that much harder to teach her science and history. I never felt like a tutor when I went to meet her, but a teacher. Tutoring after all is considered as “supplemental education services,” but with her not knowing what even Declaration of Constitution or the Civil War was, I was far from supplementary but actually her primary source of education.
It’s impossible to have a student like this become proficient on Earth Science and U.S. History with just 26 tutoring hours. I therefore didn’t make that my goal with this student. I discovered her strength to be in mathematically and logically oriented thinking skills. As long as she could connect once concept to the next, she was very quick to learn the materials. What she needed was not an effective way of absorbing and interpreting information since she already had some of that on her own, but rather a genuine interest in it. As I “tutored” her about volcanoes and tsunamis, I utilized my iPhone to show her some interesting YouTube videos of the phenomenas. With the history flashcards, we played memory games and had informal quizzes. The purpose was to get her to become find these things interesting.
In many ways, I think I had some impact in her learning career. She expressed fascination at the concepts of tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes, frequently remarking during the session that she will grow up to be a scientist. She ultimately chose not to take the Regent’s Exam for Earth Science because she didn’t feel that she was ready for it, but the important thing to me was that she had the potential to really love the topic and be motivated to delve deep into it. Getting her interested in history was a more difficult challenge. She said she didn’t understand why we had to learn it. I was never really able to give her a good reason to like history, but she at least tried hard to learn as much as she can about it. By the end of the tutoring program, she knew about 20 notable events/names in U.S. History that she didn’t know before, including which included Civil War, Bill of Rights, George W. Bush, and NAACP.
As unprepared as she was, teaching her was always fun. What was frustrating was the fact that she often was not home. This was an issue with my last two students, especially the other male student. I couldn’t tutor him at home because his mother didn’t get home from work until very late in the evening. Since the program required that a parent or some kind of adult guardian be present during the tutoring session, my program manager arranged it so that I met the student at his school during his lunch period. The school representative met me there and signed on the paperwork where the student’s parent/guardian would sign. On paper this was a workable arrangement but of course the problem was that he would come to school once or twice a week. If I was lucky, I was able to catch him for three tutoring sessions that week.
I wanted to tutor as much as I could. Actually, I needed to tutor and get my tutoring hours. My financial and housing situation were really dire then. I had no other source of income than through Champion Learning Center, which by early May was a terrifyingly ominous thing for me. The lease to my apartment was up on June 30 and so I needed enough money to pay bills and to stay in New York City long enough to be able to find another job and another apartment. Tutoring these students was a non-profit endeavor but quite frankly, I needed the money. That’s why I needed as many tutoring hours as I could get.
By that time, these two students were it. I didn’t have any more students to tutor. The reason why I only had these two students to tutor was because Champion doesn’t provide services in the summer. Mid-February was in fact the last time more students were signed on and recruited for the program. With each student supposed to be tutored four hours per week, it meant a eight-hour work week for me at the time. This fact was crushing enough but then these students were just hard to actually meet and tutor. That was extremely frustrating and stressful. I’d wake up, get all dressed up, ride that subway train to the stop near Boys and Girls High School, pass through the metal detectors and all the school safety officers dressed like police officers, and my reward for all that trouble was often, “I’m sorry; he’s not here at school today.” Even when we arranged it to have the sessions at the public library so that we could have longer tutoring sessions, even then his attendance was an issue.
There were countless times I just wanted to call it quits on these two students. But if I quit, then what? There were no more students available to tutor. There weren’t any other tutors willing to finish what I started with these two students. My program manager continually pressed me to hold longer tutoring sessions with him because now Champion Learning Center was closing in a couple of weeks. That crunch time mentality and atmosphere really wore me down those last days as a tutor. I’d sit at one of the square wooden tables in Brooklyn Public LIbrary and wait, and wait, and wait, wondering if I would actually finish tutoring these two students, wondering if my life would somehow work out. Forced to be extremely patient in such a manner, my mind drifted to dark and pessimistic thoughts, even as I just kept on keeping on, doing the best I can with what I had.
In the end I’m glad about how everything turned out. I was able to “graduate” all the students I tutored, including that 10th grader I met at his school and in the public library. All that waiting was frustrating but the waiting was important. He’d come to the library an hour and half later than our scheduled time, and I was still there at the table, ready and more than willing to tutor him then and there. His tutoring sessions happened so infrequently and so sporadically that I don’t know if I actually did much for him but at least he completed the program. With the other student, I feel much more confident. Before her very last session, her mother said to me, “She’s doing so much better now. Thank you. Before you entered her life, she was such a mess, but now she’s doing better. I know she will do better.”
The job itself, this title as an “independent contractor” proved to be a frustrating one, especially with all the bureaucratic paperwork I had to wade through. But looking back, I’m very happy I was a tutor for at least that short amount of time. It was an honor and a reward on its own to meet these rather ordinary students in drab situations, striving to be extraordinary, striving to be masters of their own fates. It was ultimately an incredibly humbling experience being a tutor and who knows, when November 2011 hits and Champion Learning Center opens again for the next school year, I may find myself tutoring again, though that time, tutoring will be my secondary source of income.