One of the senior projects being taken on this year is a tutoring program being organized by senior, Allyson Kummins. She wanted to take this project on because she had the chance to be a tutor sophomore year for a similar project. She also mentioned that Paul Marques, computer science teacher at Malden High School and advisor to NHS, encouraged students to take on this project but nobody had decided to do it.
Kummins agreed to do it and wants to “try to get the job done so it would last after [she] graduate[s], and [become] a successful program.” She was excited to do it since she “had the first hand experience with [tutoring for an NHS project].”
The actual organization of the program is being done mainly online, with the only part that won’t be, being the actual tutoring. She is using setmore.com that allows her to create a separate page for each tutor, and lets each of them make thir own schedule. She is currently looking into finding teachers to become involved.
One of the challenges that she foresees with this project is that “students may not want to admit they may need tutoring, and may not want to sign up on their own.” That is one of the reasons she wants to do it online, because she feels that “If teachers go online with the student, and helps them make an appointment, they may be more likely to come because it’s now an obligation given by the teacher, much like any other assignment.”
Kummins noted that “there are always students that need to be tutored,” so her biggest step will be finding people who are free and want to tutor. She is hoping to find students “that can tutor in a wide variety of subjects from Algebra to Chemistry to French.” She is also collaborating with former MHS teacher Arlene Ceppetelli, organizer of another tutor group located in the Teen Center, to see if they can “help each other out or combine our ideas to create a larger program.”
She has hopes that it will be a success, but notes that there’s no way she can be sure until she is done. “[she] will be happy as [as long as] she [makes] progress.”
She is confident that even if it is on a small scale this semester, that “another NHS student in the future may want to build off of the ideas [she] had” or that “Mr. Marques can help continue it in the coming years on a larger scale.”
She says that so far there haven’t been any volunteers, but that “hopefully [she] can get some [people] to join.” With that, she also mentions that there aren’t any specific qualifications needed to become a tutor. That’s why she reached out to many of the teachers here. She “asked them to mention the program to their upper level, or upperclassmen classes, and let their students know if they would be a good fit to tutor in a certain subject.” She believes that teachers would know best what subject a student would be of help in.
Also, the reason she hasn’t made a school wide announcement to students is because she doesn’t “want some who wouldn’t be helpful or that doesn’t know what they’re doing to come and say they want to tutor.” She believes that the purpose of tutoring is to help students who need it, and that doing that “wouldn’t help at all.” Another reason for not reaching out to everyone is that she “also want to make sure I have most of the details set in stone before I ask for any tutors.”
If you would like to get into contact with Kummins on being tutored or possibly being a tutor, then you can reach her at akummins17@maldenps.org.
