Weekly reflections

Rachel Weisburgh

Journal 1
Tutoring week 1
Reflections

I am now tutoring at Burlington High School in their after school program, “The Homework Center.” This experience is already incredibly different from what I did at Hunt. At hunt, I would go with the students from class to class, basically as a teachers’ helper. It was a lot of observation, and a little actually doing with the students.

At Burlington High School I am in the library and I walk around and help students as they need it. The program is for all students, not necessarily the ELL students. One girl asked me for help because she’s writing a persuasion paper on gay rights; specifically to gain the ability to enlist into the armed forces. Although I have never done anything with this topic, I directed her towards the statement “all men are created equal.” She quickly thanked me and got back to her writing.

All together I enjoyed this first week. It was a new and fun experience. I look forward to going back.


Rachel Weisburgh

Journal 2
Tutoring week 2
Reflections

This week was pretty slow. Not very many students have been coming in. This program goes along with another called “The Shades of Ebony.” UVM students have been coming in and the students are broken off into groups. We were told we weren’t allowed to help these students, as they needed to record the interaction with the students in their notebook, even though many of them needed the one-on-one time to understand their topics. When I spoke to Mr. Sparks about this, he said we were allowed to and spoke with the UVM students. It’s been smooth sailing from there.

This week there were a lot of algebra questions. What I find funny is that they are only about a week behind my college algebra course. Oh well, at least it’s all fresh in my mind. It even helped me study for my test!

One of the students I helped was completely stuck on negative exponents. She would get a problem like “make 1^-3 a positive exponent.” No matter how many times she tried, she couldn’t get what to do. When I re-explained to her that all you need to do is turn it into a fraction and make that the denominator it clicked. I love that moment. When you can tell they just get it all of a sudden. This is why I want to teach.

Rachel Weisburgh

Journal 3
Tutoring week 3
Reflections

Holy cow! This week flew by. I was sick on Tuesday, and they cancelled tutoring on Wednesday, so I came in to help on Thursday. Another day filled with math! I’m starting to like math more and more. It has those definite moments when students just get it. An “ah-ha!” moment, if you will.

Today the big focus was reading statistics. Specifically mean, median, mode, and range. Students were given a set of numbers to which they must find each of these things. They seemed to have the hardest time with the median. I’m not sure why. I had to explain to them several times how to find it. They all eventually got back on track.

Rachel Weisburgh

Journal 4
Tutoring week 4
Reflections

Another busy week! I am going to Burlington High bi-weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tuesday we had a shortened period and had a staff meeting. We formally met the other tutors and people working there. It was surprising to me that most of the UVM students aren’t education majors. One guy was earth science, another, chemistry. Well, at least I know who to go to with any science questions.

I had a lot of fun this week as well. I helped more with English. One student had to write about manic-depression. The hardest part was trying to get him to write in his own words. He kept asking me, but instead I would direct him to an easier text and try to get his words. I’d ask him questions until I got the right response.

Another student was working on sentence structure. It was the same deal with him. They try really hard to get you to give them the answer when they really do know it. Their response is so much better when they figure it out for themselves.