JBH Tutoring

This month, I’m teaching a memoir class for older adults at a local retirement community. Yesterday the prompt asked participants to discuss an influential person in their lives. I heard an inspiring story about a teacher who emphasized the value of inclusion in her French classroom. Thank you, S, for sharing.

We just learned that one of our students received admission and financial aid offers at all the schools to which he applied! Made our day. We will be publishing a complete list of college acceptances in May.

Belated good wishes to our families who celebrate Ramadan, which began last week.

To those families who celebrate, a belated Happy Lunar New Year!

𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝𝐧’𝐭 𝐇𝐢𝐫𝐞 𝐚 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐓𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐫

The ability to write well is an important lifelong skill and many students can benefit from writing coaching in order to improve their school performance.

However, there are at least three situations in which I 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝𝐧’𝐭 advise hiring a writing tutor.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭. If the student doesn’t want to make an ongoing commitment to working with a coach, the experience will be unpleasant for all involved, no matter how supportive the parent and expert the tutor. As much as we tutors believe in the value of our services, working with a student who doesn’t want to truly engage with a tutor makes no pedagogical or financial sense.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐜𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐚 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐠𝐠𝐥𝐞𝐬. Students experiencing an acute or ongoing health issue simply may not have the capacity to take on another commitment. Similarly, students affected indirectly by a change or challenge in their lives may need extra time or different resources to cope with and respond to it. I have certainly worked with students under these conditions, and I always recommend that the student focus on improving or mitigating the pressing situation at hand before adding writing support to their commitments.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭’𝐬 𝐬𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐥𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐜𝐚𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲. All of my students are super busy; sports, extracurriculars, work or caring for family members in addition to completing hours of nightly homework. For students who are so busy that they have to sacrifice virtually all of their leisure time and cut off needed hours of sleep in service to their commitments, adding tutoring may not achieve the desired results.

𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐛𝐞𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞 some of the above scenarios exist now does not mean they will be permanent. Seasons and situations change. That eighth-grader resistant to writing coaching may reconsider their need for writing support sometime during their first year of high school. Happily, many health crises or personal issues come under control or resolve themselves. A student’s schedule may free up from one semester to the next.

There is always an opportunity to revisit whether writing tutoring might make good sense in the future, when the time is right and the student is ready.

Wishing students and families a safe and warm snow day tomorrow. And please help the grownups with shoveling duties!

Last weekend we had lunch in downtown Boston with one of our former students. Now a sophomore at Northeastern, Vignan has had great experiences in the classroom and in internships through the school’s co-op program. Vignan told us he writes numerous papers for school, and recently published a paper on multimodal pain classification from physiological signals at an international conference on multimodal interaction.

We're delighted to know that we helped Vignan become a successful and effective writer. As a computer science major, Vignan plans to pursue his PhD and work in AI. Smart, funny and kind, he has a bright future ahead. Go Vignan!

Wishing all who seek to learn with curiosity, understanding and compassion a happy new year.

JBH Tutoring wishes all who celebrate a merry Christmas!

One of our favorite reading and pre-writing activities we work on with students is vocabulary development “in context,” meaning that we discuss unfamiliar words our students encounter either in classroom-assigned reading or in the high quality content we source from a variety of platforms.

In keeping with the best practices of vocabulary instruction, we prefer to teach new-to-the student words as they encounter them in context. We begin by identifying a word we suspect may be unfamiliar to them. Next, we ask them if they can guess the meaning. If they are studying Latin, Spanish or French, we ask them if they recognize any familiar roots. After that, we head to the dictionary for a definition. Finally, we discuss other sentences they may create using the word. We try to make our new sentences as playful and creative as possible, with the ultimate goal of bringing it into the students’ working vocabulary in both speaking and writing.

Below are a sample of the many new words we have discussed with students this academic year:

acclaim
brazen
carcass
dearth
juggernaut
extradited
quintessential
salvo

Other ways we teach vocabulary come from the New York Times Learning Network’s Word of the Day. Along with teaching the definition of the word, the lesson includes the number of times that word has been used in the Times in the past year along with a link to a story with the featured word. The lesson also includes an audio file that connects to the word’s pronunciation and a nifty graphic.

How do you learn or teach new vocabulary? Where do you find new-to-you words?

JBH Tutoring wishes our tutors, students and families a happy Thanksgiving! We are truly thankful for our talented colleagues and our wonderful students, who inspire us with their hard work, intellectual curiosity and sense of humor.

Yesterday one of my students and I read and discussed a newspaper article about the recent jewelry heist at the Louvre museum. The story reminded me of the opening scene from the 1975 movie The Return of the Pink Panther. In the final minutes of our session, we watched part of it. The audio in those first six minutes is the star.

The Return of the Pink Panther (1975) - Thief scene Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.