Welcoming a New Spanish Tutor

Leaning a second language can be hard - I know this from my own personal struggles to become bilingual. The right teacher can make the task more approachable, enjoyable, and rewarding as well as making the student more successful. The wrong teacher can make learning another language feel downright impossible. The best teachers possess fluency in the language they are teaching, a solid understanding of grammar, detailed knowledge of educational techniques, good humor, and boundless patience. That’s a lot to ask for. People with all of this in abundance are rare - which is why I feel so lucky to have found one of them.

She’s an experienced teacher, a Fulbright Scholar, and incredibly enthusiastic about learning and teaching. Our new Spanish tutor is Katie Gordon, and we’re very excited to have her!

Review of "The Last Slice of Rainbow"

As an English tutor, I am regularly faced with the problem of assessing a student’s reading skills when I am also meeting her or him for the first time. This is a difficult task, because I know little or nothing about the student, yet an effective assessment relies on using materials that are near the student’s actual reading level. A further complication is that I want to start out with something enjoyable, because it is important for me to make a good first impression on my students.

The short stories collected in The Last Slice of Rainbow by Joan Aiken have turned out to be some of the best assessment tools I’ve found, especially for middle schoolers (the age group I work with most frequently).

These stories have the excellent quality of being able to be read on multiple levels. Taken literally, the tales are simple and almost fairy-tale like. For the more sophisticated reader, however, the stories are filled with thought-provoking ideas that can be teased out and discussed. Likewise with the vocabulary: on the whole, the vocabulary is quite basic, but the stories are peppered with enough unusual words to allow me to assess a student.

None of this would work if the stories weren’t really good. I’ve had my copy of The Last Slice of Rainbow since I was a child, and it is one of the few books from my childhood that I have elected to hold on to through multiple moves and bouts of clearing out my apartment. The stories are charming, but not saccharine; sweet, but not gentle; fairy-tale like, but not predictable. The protagonists are boys and girls with problems, hopes, flaws, and successes that are easy to relate to, but magical enough to be an escape from everyday life. Also, they are short enough to fit comfortably into a one-hour lesson.

The Last Slice of Rainbow is a book that I heartily recommend to students and teachers alike. Frankly, if adults were to read it, most of them would enjoy it, too.

Is Long Division Disappearing from Elementary School?

Traditionally, long division is one of the things every elementary school student learns. Way back when, I remember learning it in the 5th grade, Singapore Math introduces it in the 3rd grade, and the New York City core curriculum indicates that students should learn long division in 4th grade (although I couldn’t actually find the term “long division” in that document). So why are so many students entering middle school completely unaware of how to do long division?
In New York City, many public and some private schools are using a curriculum called Everyday Mathematics. This curriculum has some strong points- it is good at promoting critical thinking skills and connecting math to real-world situations. But, the creators of this curriculum seem to have a fear of algorithms. They try to avoid the tools that everyone uses for calculations because these shortcuts don’t promote understanding of how numbers work. Unfortunately, this leaves students crippled when it comes time to solve problems.

I find that many of my students who have studied this curriculum are very good at identifying the actions they need to take to solve a word problem. In other words, they know that they have to divide, and they know what numbers to divide, but they have no idea how to get the division done in an efficient manner.

This is clearly a case where tutoring can be very helpful. As a tutor, I’ve introduced many students to long division and a wide variety of other mathematical tools (i.e., the rule for dividing fractions or the traditional method of multiplying multiple-digit numbers). I believe it is very important to teach these methods in a way that will help rather than hinder students in their schooling. For example, some teachers do not allow their students to use traditional algorithms as their primary means of solving problems- in theses cases, it is necessary to show students how traditional methods of calculation can be used as a compliment to non-traditional methods.
I find the trend of skimming over calculation techniques to be quite disturbing. It seems to be the result of “math wars” that pit different teaching methods against each other. Often, the crux of the argument seems to be computation skills vs. conceptual understanding. These positions become ideological in nature and one unfortunate result is the formation of camps of extremists who don’t like to acknowledge the value of the other side. It’s a false dichotomy, and the consequences for students can be quite serious.

Computational skills are necessary for real conceptual understanding and without conceptual understanding, computational skills become mere parlor tricks. When computational skills are taught without context (these days, this is a problem most prevalent in parochial schools), students have poor retention and can’t figure out how to effectively solve word problems or relatively complex, open ended problems. When computational skills are glossed over, students tend to go into calculations correctly, but get terribly bogged down by the mechanics. The solution seems clear: students need computational practice and drills as well as thoughtful investigation of mathematical concepts. The disappearance of long division from many elementary schools is only one symptom of a deeply unfortunate trend.

Test Preparation for Gifted Children

Recently, there was an article in the New York Times that discussed an Asian-style cram school preparing students to take the Hunter College High School entrance exam. Although the article was generally favorable and the school sounded reputable, I nevertheless found the whole thing a bit disturbing.

Before going any further, let me state clearly that I value academic excellence and I believe in stretching kids intellectually. I am not afraid of hard work and I think it is important that children learn its value. However, I also strongly believe in the value of free time, play, daydreaming, sports, and arts. That goes for everyone, but most especially, it goes for children. Cram school may have academic value, but at what cost?

My approach to tutoring children for the Hunter High School entrance exam (and other tests such as the Anderson School Entrance Exam, SCAT, SHSAT, and ISEE) is much more moderate. On the one hand, I give my advanced students sophisticated, stimulating material. Often, it is the most challenging material that they have ever been exposed to. I also give homework. On the other hand, I don’t want my students to study excessively. In the long run, excessive studying is harmful because it pushes out too many other valuable activities and, in its most extreme form, it can even be cruel.

Moderation is key. I vary the amount of work I expect from each student depending on his or her other commitments, goals, and abilities. In test preparation situations, this usually breaks down to one (perhaps two) lessons per week and one to five hours of homework spread out over the course of a week. This regimen gets results without sacrificing childhood or risking burnout in the process.

Review of The Official SAT Study Guide

My SAT students often ask me what book I recommend, and there is one SAT prep book that is the clear winner: The Official SAT Study Guide. This book is published by the College Board, which is the organization that makes the actual SAT exam, so the tests are the closest possible match to the real test in terms of difficulty, style, and content.

There is only one disadvantage to using The Official SAT Study Guide that I am aware of: it does not provide answer explanations (although it does provide answers). For my students (who obviously have a tutor), the lack of answer explanations is not a big deal. Providing those explanations is part of my job, after all. On the other hand, students who are studying on their own might want to consider one of the other SAT prep books, since having answer explanations is key to learning to do difficult problems.

Advanced Placement Biology

When I was in high school, Advanced Placement Biology was one of my favorite classes. I was hungry for an intellectual challenge and deeply curious about the biological world. I saw the class as a way to answer my questions about that world.

My AP Biology class was tough. It was probably harder than most AP Bio classes, since I don’t think I ever got better than a B in the class but I got the highest possible score on the AP exam (a 5) and found the test easy. As difficult as the class was, it was also tons of fun. I looked forward to it every day and never resented the massive piles of homework because I was learning what I wanted to learn.

In my mind, this is what an Advanced Placement class should be- a challenging course for high school students who want to take learning to the next level. And when I tutor AP Biology students, my tutoring is informed by these views.

I don’t treat the exam as an opportunity to use test-taking tricks to “game” the test. Instead, I treat studying for this test as an opportunity to explore a rich and deep curriculum.

There are several teaching tools I rely on very heavily with my AP Bio students. The first, and perhaps most important, is essay writing. Some AP Biology teachers have their students write essays regularly, but many do not. This is unfortunate for several reasons. For one thing, writing essays on topics such as “Compare and contrast situations in which new species are likely to arise and situations in which speciation is unlikely to occur” or “Describe two situations in which heredity is non-Mendelian in nature and explain what these situation reveal about the physical structure of the genome or the physical process of meiosis” is a great way to synthesize and solidify knowledge. A collection of finished essays also forms a valuable review tool to use just before the exam. And, of course, all this essay writing makes writing the essays on the test itself a breeze.

I also spend a great deal of time with students discussing important experiments that have been done. This serves several purposes. It’s a great way to reinforce content knowledge and it also promotes scientific thinking and an understanding of experimental design. Conveniently, it also helps students greatly on the data interpretation section of the test.

Finally, even the best students have areas where they struggle. I identify these areas for each of my students and make sure that they spend extra time studying those topics. Of course, part of this time is spent simply talking through the details but I often expose my students to a variety of supplemental materials that present the information in different ways. For example, I’ve got some favorite videos that show various biological concepts in highly visual and very accurate ways and I just love Dragon Genetics (possibly the coolest study tool ever invented).

Advanced Placement Biology isn’t easy, but it should be interesting and fun. As a tutor, I’m not going to hide the challenge, but I will help students tackle it in an efficient, effective, and positive way.