Archived News Item

Tutoring

So, I haven’t written anything for this site since my first article.

I apologize for that. I suppose I’ve been caught up in all the work of Junior year and all of my extra-curriculars. I’ll try to update more often with things of interest from now on, but I offer no guarantees.

However, because I don’t feel like doing my homework tonight, I’d like to take a moment to complain about something really worth complaining about: the tutoring system at Berkeley High.

For those of you in Honors or AP classes, you know this tutoring system. For those of you who aren’t, it’s like this:

The Honors Geometry students are required to tutor other students for two hours per quarter in order to get the “Honors” class status on their transcript. This is not such an unreasonable number. Assuming you can get 40 minutes for a lunch time tutoring session—often times they will only give you 30 or 35 in the SLC/CCC—it will take you three lunches per quarter. If you can only get 30 minutes, it will take you four.

For every level higher, they add on another two hours per quarter (Honors Algebra 2 require four hours, Honors Math Analysis requires six hours, etc.). Honors Algebra 2 is still fairly reasonable at four hours quarterly—a maximum of six lunch times per semester. It starts getting a little unreasonable once you get to Honors Math Analysis. You have six hours of tutoring to do. That’s at least nine lunch time sessions. There are approximately nine weeks in a quarter. You may want to start tutoring after school at this point.

Once you get to AP Calculus or AP Statistics it gets to a ridiculous level, with eight hours of tutoring per quarter and a lower grade if you don’t complete it. That’s at least 12 lunches per quarter. That's more than one lunch session per week. This can take up a lot of your time, especially if you’re involved in clubs that meet during lunch on week days (and you’ll want to be involved in clubs, because they help you get into college). You’ll almost certainly want to tutor after school at this point. This gets particularly difficult with students who have lots of difficult classes and/or extra-curriculars

Now, if tutoring were as simple as just walking in to the SLC/CCC at lunchtime, sitting down with someone, and helping them with homework, then six—or even eight—hours might sound reasonable, but it’s not that simple.

Because of the way this system works, there are almost always more people who need to tutor than people who need to be tutored. I, personally, have been caught on more than one occasion wandering through the SLC/CCC asking people at every table, “Does anyone here want to be tutored?”

More often than not, the answer is: “No, but may I tutor you?”

So, how do the students deal with this? They cheat. On the older sheets it was pretty easy to change the number of minutes the sheet said you had tutored for. I know of a particularly nifty trick which involves getting the supervisor to sign off that you had tutored for 10 minutes and then changing the 10 to a 40 by adding a stroke in a pen of the same color (the pen color has been changed in the example for the sake of showing how it’s done):

Then they came out with some newer, more cheat proof tutoring sheets which required that people get signed off in blocks of 15 minutes. So, people just ask their friends to hang out with them in the tutoring room for 40 minutes and pretend to be tutored. Others just forge signatures (an “Edna Harris” is pretty easy with only a little bit practice).

The tutoring system doesn’t really benefit many people. The people who really need the tutoring don’t show up to the SLC/CCC to be tutored. The result is a room full of tutors pretending to tutor their friends (and sometimes actually helping their friends with math… I don’t want to make it sound like no one benefits at all) and a couple tutors just looking for people to tutor.

The math department could solve this by doing a couple of things: lower the number of hours required of the higher level math students and actively work on attracting the students who need tutoring to the SLC/CCC at lunch and after school.

Tutoring is due, in most classes, at the end of the quarter, tomorrow. For those of you Honors and AP students out there, I hope you’re finished.

— Harris