As a student, if I had a good report card my parents would let me order whatever I wanted at Dairy Queen, instead of the standard five Dilly Bars for $1 my family always got. While picking something from the big menu was exciting, I realized that as extravagant as banana splits sound, the bananas are a mushy nuisance that distracts from the ice cream.
I decided the smart kids could have them and I moved on with my mediocre grades and discounted Dilly Bar.
The past few years, I’ve been a tutor at the Guardian Catholic School. While I had some experience as a substitute teacher, I was hesitant to take on this volunteer role because I didn’t want to be the reason a struggling student slipped farther behind. In short — I didn’t want to fail.
I knew failure as a student. In third grade, my struggle with math began and it peaked when I failed ninth-grade algebra. I remember the pleading eyes of teachers and tutors after they would explain a lesson. It seemed like they believed if they stared at me long and hard enough, I would understand how to reduce a fraction or cross multiply or find the square root.
Instead, I would just nod at them with a weak, embarrassed smile; too self-conscious from their intense gazing to think of math at all.
Sister Susan Reineck who runs the afterschool tutoring program at Guardian is nothing like that. She’s soft-spoken and encouraging. I’ve watched her teach. She doesn’t rush students or shame them. She’s patient and calm, and starts where the students are; not where they should be.
I’ve benefited from her instruction on ways to approach teaching and am awed by how capable she is and how capable she makes others feel. I sometimes wonder if I would have struggled so much in math if I had someone as patient and resourceful as Sister Susan teaching me.
When I tutor, I try to be mindful of my own negative experiences. I don’t correct every mispronounced word. I try to come up with fun or creative ways to explain different meanings of words and the emotions they connotate. Almost always, I show her pictures of my pets or tell a funny story about my life. We talk about our families, her best friend, places she has visited, and where she wants to attend high school.
We write summaries of the pages we read, and for weeks we practiced a speech she was assigned in one of her classes — writing it, rewriting, and learning to project her soft-spoken voice to the back of the room where I sat cheering. Once, I read her a column I’d written that appeared in the newspaper and she seemed in awe. Read more