Update: Helping Teenagers get a higher score on their SAT
I wanted to take a moment to update family and friends on my volunteer tutoring at Washington High School in San Francisco.
As of this morning I’ve received $420 in donations which is fantastic! This money is being used to purchase some very expensive SAT practice test, vocabulary study, and grammar books (yeah, I’m even purchasing The Elements of Style by Strunk & White for my class).
Donate to my cause; click here on the “Donate” button==>>
To recap for you, I decided it was time to give my time instead of money to my community. I volunteered to teach a class on “Increasing Your SAT Score” to a group of Juniors and Seniors at Washington High School in The Richmond District of San Francisco. I have about 15 students who show up every 2-weeks for my 3-hour class.
I was really nervous for the first class, but my friend Alison (she’s a professor at a local college) calmed me down and helped me put together a plan. I can still hear her now: “Stuart, you can’t talk the whole time; they’ll get bored; you have to figure out how to get them to talk”. That single comment stimulated me into action, and before you knew it, I had created a highly interactive Power Point presentation where I used a didactic yet Socratic method to get the kids to talk and become engaged in the learning process. Alison helped me brainstorm a whole bunch of ways to teach my SAT class.
The first class was slightly better than a disaster (ok, I’m my own worst critic). I put examples on the board that didn’t work, I got lost in my notes, and fumbled around a lot. I even started sweating.
But after the class, all I could remember was their faces! They were paying attention and were engaged. And several of them came up and told me it was “a great class” and some even thanked me.
What could I do to top that? Well, I went back and re-studied my notes, practiced my examples, and prepared and prepared.
If the 1st class was a disaster (in my opinion) the 2nd class was more like hitting a home run. I had more kids in the 2nd class than in the 1st class (apparently the word had gotten out and more kids signed up). And some had actually learned something in the 1st class and were able to Socratically teach some of the others about the concepts. During the 2nd class as I was making a point to one of the students, I actually got goose bumps….I was teaching and the kids were learning!
The 3rd class was like a dream. The students had naturally broken out into different groups, and it became easier for me to teach. Some of the students have felt more comfortable to speak up, some have picked their favorite places to sit which has helped me to remember their names, and all-in-all, we’ve become a highly performing functional group, all focused on one thing: to get their SAT scores higher.
Tune in soon for another update on our progress.
Stuart