This year while I'm waiting to hear back from grad schools, I've been working a few jobs.  One of those jobs is to tutor for the school district at the high school library on Tuesday and Thursday nights.  The <a href="http://msittig.freeshell.org/brea2002/brea_tutoring_library.jpg" title="Picture of the library (18k)">Brea Olinda High School library</a> is not a big place to begin with, and it has about as much space dedicated to computers as it does to bookshelves.  Consequently, most students don't go there to read or check out books--rather, they go to chat quietly, read magazines, or instant message their friends in between periods.

On Tuesday nights, we usually have between ten and thirty students show up for tutoring.  Most of them come for math help, a smattering for chemistry or physics, and there is an occasional Spanish or history assignment to be looked at.  This is usually how it goes:  I walk in ten or fifteen minutes late, Ms Cook is sitting at a table helping some girls with their math, the chatty crowd says "hey Mr Sittig!" and I wave back; I walk over to Ms Cook's table and say hi, then set my bookbag down on the table.  In my bookbag I carry a <acronym title="Texas Instruments">TI</acronym>-85 graphing calculator, an old wooden ruler, a couple of scratch notebooks and a bunch of sign-in sheets.  I pull out a sheet, and take it over to the girls' table and drop it off with Ms Cook, who is busy helping out some students.  Ms Cook teaches Integrated Math 1 and Math B; I've subbed for her a few times, and that's all it took to feel sorry for her, the kids are pretty rowdy!  

After that, I've already got a few kids calling me over to their table so I glance around the room and look for Alec, one of the regulars.  He is one of the kids who was pretty behind at the beginning of the year, when I taught his Integrated 3 class for six weeks as a long-term sub; but he has really worked hard and improved by leaps and bounds.  Just this week, he was taking shortcuts on his chemistry assignment, the good kind of shortcuts that showed he really understood what he was doing.  After chatting with Alec for a minute or two, I try to figure out who raised their hand first: it's fairly arbitrary, though I like to help the new people first just to make them feel welcome.

In a minute, Noah will come up and start talking to me.  Noah's sister was valedictorian this year (along with my sister, I might add) but he has no such ambitions.  Noah wants to be military man, a general if possible.  His family is very conservative; he likes to read his parents' <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/" title="Online news and commentary from conservative perspective." class="magazine title">Weekly Standard</a> and books about military history.  He's very opinionated and will talk your ear off if you give him the chance.  But it's OK, because he's a reasonable person and a very logical thinker with a firm grasp of the facts.  It's too bad he doesn't apply himself as a student, because he's a very bright kid.

Noah usually doesn't need help, so I walk around and answer questions, give hints, and snatch away peoples' calculators when their calculator-dependency comes out.  Seriously, I'm usually a skeptic when people decry the decline of another time-worn institution--I prefer to think of them as <em>transformations</em>--but teaching of the mathematical basics has really gone downhill.  The problem is not that the kids can't do math.  On the contrary, they are remarkably bright (usually).  The problem is that they have been taught that they can't do math without a calculator.  Remember back in the day when, if the answer didn't come out to a whole number, you could assume that you hadn't gotten the correct solution?  Textbook manufacturers caught onto that, so today virtually every problem in math and physics books has a decimal answer and requires a calculator to solve.  So now I get kids who change 1/2 and 2/3 into decimals before multiplying them together.  That's why I have a reputation for snatching calculators out of kids' hands and making them do the math on paper or in their heads.  It's a reputation I enjoy. (it's 1/3, by the way)

As the two hour tutoring time draws to a close, I seek out the sign-in sheet and write my name at the bottom, leaving it with Ms Cook to drop off in the counselor's box in the morning.  The sessions last until eight o'clock, but the library closes and eight thirty so I usually stay a little later and help out the kids who are taking longer.  I pull out my keys, walk down the stairs and in front of the office to the parking lot, bundle into the <a href="http://msittig.freeshell.org/brea2002/brea_home_volvoparked.jpg" title="Volvo picture (40k)">trusty-rusty Volvo DL</a> and head home.

--Tomorrow night I plan to take my short band radio to tutoring, and Garret and I are going to play around with it.  With luck we'll pick up Saddam Hussain's final "Allah akbar, and death to the infidels."