Who’s responsibility? Ours.

[Thomas White]

While my experience at the SSC was overwhelmingly positive, I am left with an image tinged with discontent. I tutored students in a variety of subjects, but none more than writing. One day I helped a student who brought to the SSC by his teacher so that he could catch up on a missing assignment. The assignment was one many other tutors from Carleton encountered over the term. It asked students to describe, through their own understanding, the American Dream. As one could expect of a student brought to the homework help room by your own teacher, this student did not appear the most motivated to write. Although he thoughtfully responded to each of my probing questions to get him thinking about the prompts, it was difficult to get him to do much more. Writing seemed to be a great challenge for him– his grammar and vocabulary skills seemed to starkly contrast with those asked of by the assignment. At the end of the hour, we had a somewhat more detailed outline, and I didn’t see him again. I was left stinging at the irony of the assignment task.

Although this strays from the request of this blog post, I don’t consider this image to be representative of my tutoring experience as a whole. I worked with many students who filled me with hope and awe in the power of alternative learning spaces and MKOs (college tutors). Nevertheless, I chose this example because it represents the gaping hole in the American public education system that the SSC is designed to ameliorate. In other words, it is representative of my thinking about the structural role of the SSC and my experience working there.

I believe that the SSC is an incredible resource for Northfield High School. However, it is at the SSC that the failures of the schooling system are most visible. While some students appeared to greatly benefit from working with college tutors like myself, others, like this student, could only benefit so much. I don’t mean for this to come across as though I’m assuming that we can only measure the benefit of tutoring by what they accomplish on the page. It’s clear that tutoring can benefit not only a students understanding of their class material, but also help them develop better approaches to learning and seeing themselves as good students. But, for this example, it seemed like the student may have been excessively challenged by this assignment. This suggests that although this student is in 10th grade English, he is not writing at a 10th grade English level. While students who struggle in school are often taught to internalize their inability to meet class standards as a problem of their own, the prevalence of this problem suggests it may be the school.

[image: to demonstrate the student’s frustrations with writing the essay]

The specific problem at hand can seem to be explained from a constructivist perspective. According to this model, learning takes place through assimilation, when one adds new ideas into an existing mental framework, and accommodation, when one expands a mental framework to be able to account for a new concept. This seems to suggest that when material turns out to be too challenging or too easy for a student, neither assimilation nor accommodation can take place. For the student I helped that day, writing a full essay by himself (or even with the help of a tutor) was an extremely difficult task. Maybe this speaks to a failure of the school system– he has not learned enough to be able to write an essay by himself or with the help of a tutor. Or, as my hunch goes, maybe this was the fault of the assignment. I challenge or no challenge, I could tell this student was bright and capable of formal operational thought. Maybe reflecting this thought was not best prompted by a standard 5 paragraph essay.

Ultimately, what I am left with from this image and my rambling reflection is the connectedness of everything that occurs in school to students’ overall cognitive development. While teachers try to measure the growth of their students in individual classes (lesson plan goals) or across the entire year, students’ growth actually hinges upon much more than what goes on in that class. The student I worked with obviously struggled with writing in comparison to where the assignment asked him to be. Thus, whatever standards previously asked of him that he was not able to meet could have compounded over time. In the progression of public school, one year has the ability to set a student back in their cognitive development, whether academic, social, or emotional. We are seeing the dramatic effects of this phenomenon as students come back from over a year and a half of school from home. While the connectedness of teaching can seem scary, it can also be inspiring. A school is a community. The teachers, students, staff, and parents are connected by their shared investment in the growth of their students– in order to do this, people must work together. However, despite their commitment to these valuable goals, schools can fail when not the structure is not designed properly. The student I worked with went likely went through years of schooling without ever getting the help he needs to improve his writing. The SSC is one of Northfield High School’s ways of helping students like him out. However, it was clear to me that day the SSC, despite the wonders (and I truly mean that!) it does, is not enough to support struggling students.

[image to demonstrate the connectedness of schools]

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