In a recent blog post on Zen and the Art of Admissions, I made a somewhat controversial statement about the types of extra-curricular activities that students should pursue. In the pursuit of excellence, I suggested that any activity from the math team to video games might be valid. I’ll use this post to elaborate and clarify my stance on the matter.
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Archive for the ‘Mentorship and Advice’ Category
Teenagers and Organization Often Don’t Mix: How Tutoring Can Help
I write this post from a place of authority – I was once a teenage boy. I remember quite clearly that my backpack was a perpetual disaster area. My binders, no matter how hard I tried, could never seem to stay…well…bound. I wrote homework assignments everywhere except my planner. I made poor judgments about whether to spend time chatting on instant messenger or doing my homework. The list goes on and on…
Having worked with many teenage boys, and judging by my own experience, this is sometimes an unavoidable problem. It’s not permanent – most people grow out of it. I did about three years into my time at Harvard, and really shed the bad habits when I had to start running a business. But, for some reason, it can often be absolutely unavoidable for the teenage years. Maybe it’s the wiring, or the hormones. Whatever the cause, teenage male disorganization can be academically debilitating.
What’s the solution? Yelling? Screaming? 3-Hole Punching? These all work occasionally, but the best solution I’ve found is tutoring. Having a once-a-week homework-help check-in with an experienced tutor gives students someone to lean on for help. Simple activities like weekly binder cleanups, planning in advance for homework and larger projects, and discussing and implementing simple time management techniques can work miracles. Often students have no one with whom to discuss these sorts of things: peers are equally inept, teachers only care about their class and are strapped for time, parents are too embroiled.
It is perhaps even more important that students have someone safe to whom they can be held accountable. The relationship that forms between a good tutor and student is safe from the threatening, grade-bestowing teacher, the hyper-involved parent, and the judgement of peers. It’s a haven where the student can open up, ask for academic advice, be themselves, and also learn to look up to someone for their intellect and academic excellence. In this haven, tutors can inspire and motivate teenage boys, or any student for that matter, to try just a bit harder to keep everything together.
At Veritas we have seen a number of students who benefit from organizational help. And often just a bit goes a long way. Also, we have seen a strong trend toward independence with these students as well. The tutoring serves as training wheels of sorts for students to learn how to manage their own work in a stressful, demanding environment. Tutoring, in this case, is akin to training wheels on a bike. Once a student masters their organizational and time management skills, they no longer need the tutoring and are far better prepared for success as they move forward in their academic careers.
The Perfect Student: Discipline as Existential Feng Shui
Discipline is an often misunderstood concept. (Though this may surprise you, at no other time in my life did I see discipline misrepresented more than during my four years at Harvard.) Often met with a groan from teenagers and adults alike, discipline tends to signify work, effort, and overall unhappiness. Discipline, however, can also mean fun and relaxation if carried out correctly. For instance, consider the following example of a hard-working yet undisciplined student:
Zen and the Art of Admissions
Though I do a great deal of academic advising and understand the rampant competition for undergraduate and graduate admissions, I am always careful about suggesting activities for the “wrong reasons.” I never want students to participate in activities just for the admissions process; rather, I urge genuine interest and the pursuit of excellence. A stellar application is merely a by-product of bona fide effort.
Volunteer Tutoring
For the past three years, we have been engaged in a number of pro-bono tutoring projects, most notably running a homework help center at the Graham and Parks School in Cambridge, MA. It’s fantastic and we’ve managed to help a number of kids improve their MCAS scores and prepare for the transition to high school. Here’s a quick run-down of our volunteer activities.
I’ve also come across a fantastic Ted Talk by Dave Eggers regarding his 826 Valencia project. Hopefully it’s only a matter of time before Veritas expands its volunteer offerings to this level… But what kind of faux retail store to open with it? Please share your ideas.
The Perfect Student
I had come to tutoring through a long history of volunteering and decided, last October, that I wanted to return to those roots. I looked up volunteer opportunities in Cambridge and found the Cambridge Public Library Literacy Project. Through them, I met my student, I’ll call her A, an Ethiopian immigrant who had only rudimentary English skills at best.
Free Play
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
-David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College
Dos and Don’ts
This blog post is in response to a recent New Yorker article, “Don’t,” from the May 18, 2009 issue. For those unfamiliar with the article, it can be found here. For those too busy to indulge in a full-length New Yorker feature, I have provided the following brief summary.
Zen and the Art of Parenting
“You must teach your kids they are special without having them think they are more special than anyone else.”
-Ray Magliozzi, Car Talk
A treatise on the middle path of child-rearing – or, how to help your offspring traverse the razor’s edge of adolescence – with input from Tom and Ray Magliozzi of NPR’s Car Talk.
Your teachers did make fun of you in the teacher’s lounge
After months of being chided by my teacher friends that “tutoring” was not the same thing as “teaching,” I finally decided enough was enough and volunteered to teach a full day of seventh grade social studies in the classroom of my lifelong friend, Chris. Although I fully realized he had orchestrated the argument Tom Sawyer-like to get out of a day’s work, the chance to teach a lesson in the same classroom where I had spent my formative years was not to be passed up. The fact that Chris and I had also met (and caused ample trouble) in that classroom was merely an ironic bonus.
This work by Veritas Tutors is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.