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Confidence Education
"The teacher told me my cousin wasn’t turning in homework. That seemed strange to me since I had been with her the past two weeks, and she never seemed to need help."
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By Karime Blanco
I’ve been working with kids since the summer after my 8th grade year, and it seems to me every year there’s a decline in the level of education these young kids receive. Although I’ve tutored kids of many races, I’ve worked the most with 2nd generation Mexicans. Lately I’ve been working with a program called Mentoring for Academic Success. My students are 2nd to 5th graders. The program is supposed to end in a public writing festival at a local bookstore.
I expected it would be a place of creativity and different types of writing. But while I’m trying to teach about haikus and limericks, my kids are stuck on the very basics. I’ve reached a level of trust with these kids, to where they no longer cover their writing; they show it to me so that I can correct it. I hadn’t noticed how much help some of these kids actually needed, but it really clicked when one little girl asked me “How do you spell I?” or when the same little girl asked me how to spell dance. I said, “D-A-N-C-E” and she replied with “C of C, or C of S?”
The problem isn’t the kids’ intelligence. And there are a million places they could go for help. But kids need someone they can trust. From what I’ve noticed, they get enough ridicule at school for not knowing everything the rest of the kids there know, so they close themselves from everyone and try to take it into their own hands.
I’ve noticed the problem in my own family. I have a nine-year-old cousin who wasn’t getting the help she needed at school. I could tell she was at a turning point. She could either work just a little bit harder to catch up with the kids ahead of her, or pretty soon, she would start hiding in the back of the class and hoping not to get called on. I took care of my cousin after school, and she acted like she didn’t need help with her homework. Like she knew everything she was doing. I thought nothing of it until I got a call from her teacher, who knew I was looking after her. The teacher told me my cousin wasn’t turning in homework. That seemed strange to me since I had been with her the past two weeks, and she never seemed to need help.
I saw this as an opportunity and a challenge all at once. I could either leave it alone and let her mom deal with the situation, or set an example. I started tutoring my cousin every day after school. I didn’t just watch her do her homework, I went over it with her. It was hard at first because she seemed embarrassed that I was constantly hanging over her shoulder. After about a month of tutoring my cousin everyday after school, she started actually doing her homework, by herself, correctly! I was so proud.
Tutoring kids has taught me something, too. When a child is struggling, that’s one of their most vulnerable moments, so they need to work with someone they can trust. Kids aren’t machines who can just be turned on to smarts whenever they’re told.
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