Personal Narrative: Tuesday Night Tutoring

At the start of high school, I learned that all students at my school were expected to perform sixty hours of community service before graduating. I hoped that my time would be well used, and that I could create a noticeable difference in someone else's life.

I had always thought of myself as good with kids, so I decided to try participate in Tuesday Night Tutoring, a program hosted by my school aimed at helping children to read. I naively believed that I could give them a few tips I used when I first learned to read, and at the same time help them to absorb some information from the practice readings, but reality fell very far short of my hopes. I struggled both to convince the children that they were mispronouncing several words and that my pronunciations were any better, and my efforts to explain the meaning of various words only necessitated additional definitions. If they believed me, the children would usually forget everything within a week. I continued trying for almost twenty hours of reading tutoring,
In addition, by quizzing the students on what I taught them the week before, their natural desire to impress helped them keep focused while learning and retain their information. For example, a third grader, Diana, was struggling to remember her multiplication facts, especially those involving multiples of seven, eight, and nine. She was never really motivated to learn them, so I challenged her to tell me at the start of the next lesson what eight times nine was. It took a few weekly reminders before she got it, but to my joy, she yelled out seventy-two when she saw me one week later, before I even asked. By repeating this every week with more multiplication facts, Diana was able to complete a multiplication table within a month of