I first worked with Grace when she was in eighth grade. She was writing a paper about her dog and was stuck in a rut. She wasn’t bad at writing or at putting sentences together, but she was having trouble figuring out exactly what she needed to write about and how to work it into her overall structure. With guidance, she was able to reorganize her essay and finish with a piece she could be proud of.
Four years later, I had that day in the back of my mind as I worked with Grace at her last tutoring session. She was at the end of her senior year, close to graduation, and was wrapping up her final paper for her Dual Enrollment English Literature class. She had decided to analyze the portrayal of personal identity in three very different works: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and the 13th-century French text Le Roman de Silence. While I helped her focus her thesis statement and caught some typos and grammatical errors, the essay was very much her writing and her ideas. She was so locked in on her work, I don’t think she noticed me grinning ear to ear to see how much she had grown.
As our founder, Julia Ross, likes to say, there’s a sort of magic to tutoring. Students come to us in all states: some are looking for some extra school support, some are already strong students and are looking to become stronger, and some are struggling in their courses and looking for whatever help they can find. No matter how they arrive, if we have done our job right, they leave more knowledgeable and more confident.
Our driving philosophy is that “competence builds confidence.” We do our best to build our students’ knowledge, helping them to start succeeding in their classes and bolstering their confidence. The more confident they are, the easier it becomes to build their competence. That, in turn, even further increases their confidence. This positive feedback loop is transformative. Over the years, I have seen plenty of students like Grace grow from anxious and stressed kids to confident and strong adults. I also remember her older brother, Jake, who first came to us for help in Spanish. I watched that, frankly disruptive, teenager grow into a well-disciplined young man with a cultivated love for history. When he swung by our classroom a few weeks ago while home on vacation from college, I couldn’t help but remember the boy who would do everything he could to avoid practicing Spanish.
These changes don’t always take years. I’ll never forget that one tenth grader who, after a few weeks of tutoring in math with Mr. Kaddoura, asked his mom for a geometry textbook for his birthday. We have had students who were so anxious they could hardly enter our classroom leave smiling and in good spirits after their first session with Dr. Driscoll, and Dr. Ghannouchi has saved many students who came to us desperate for help on an upcoming chemistry test. Sometimes they even come back to us after high school: Dr. G is, in fact, about to help one of our former students as she takes Organic Chemistry over the summer on her way to a nursing degree.
At the heart of it all is our founder, Julia Ross. She is the original source of this magic, and it is her spell we continue to weave. Back when we tutored in a small building on her property, she called it “The Magic of the Cottage.” But given that we have since moved to our classroom in Burke and the magic is still there, it might be more accurate to call it “The Magic of Professional Tutoring.”
As testament to the magic, I can think of no better example than our first “second-generation” tutoring student. I have been working with her for two years, but Julia tutored her mother back when Professional Tutoring first began.
Matt Dischner – Director of Academics, Professional Tutoring