Photo: Original Monorail structure in Lego by child, age 8

When we say someone is “smart,” what type of intelligence are we describing? Are we thinking about the athlete who has to strategically pace herself through fifty laps? Or the artist who finds the perfect balance between light and shadows in an oil painting? Or the plumber who fixes pipes in buildings with intricate and complex architectural designs?

In recent weeks, thousands of people across the United States and around the world have taken to the streets to protest police brutality and the police’s murders of Black people. Women and men like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd have lost their lives because of senseless, racialized violence. To many children, experiencing this historic moment of protests, rightful outrage, and constant change can be overwhelming. They may have learned about the Civil Rights Movement in their textbooks, but living through major social justice events may be a little harder to process. With so many disparate opinions on our current events, children are receiving quite a few messages about what people are protesting for and why these past few weeks have been the breaking point for many people within and allies of Black communities. So how can we help our children understand these protests and the advocacy we’re seeing around the world?

Provide Historical Context

Unfortunately, the struggle for racial equity in the United States is long, painful, and constant. For some children, these protests may seem like isolated events. Why are people mad now? they may ask. Providing our children with a more comprehensive view of history will help them have a better understanding for how these injustices extend beyond our current moment.

Resources:

“The George Floyd protests – and riots – are a rebellion against an unjust system”:

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/04/george-floyd-protests-riots-rebellion

Consider Our Current Moment from a Child’s Point-of-View

Children and adults process and understand differently from one another. Finding resources that specifically have children in mind can be a helpful way to prepare your discussion with your child. Experts consider how children typically approach problems and how we can address their needs with mindfulness and compassion.

Resources:

Watch the entire CNN/Sesame Street racism town hall:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/06/app-news-section/cnn-sesame-street-race-town-hall-app-june-6-2020-app/index.html

How to talk to kids about racism, explained by a psychologist:

https://www.vox.com/identities/2020/6/9/21283715/how-to-talk-kids-racism-race-protests

The Tailored Tutoring LLC Writing Team

Back in the late 1990s, I homeschooled both of my children after we moved to a new town and a new school district. Little by little, I bought a curriculum and instructed them in everything from reading to science. I had been an educator for years at that point, but I was surprised that some of my most challenging pupils became my children. I found that I was more easily angered when they didn’t listen or completely perplexed by their inability to sit for more than a few minutes. And I didn’t even have to compete with the numerous distractions that kids have nowadays. Okay, I thought. If I want to make homeschooling work, I have to figure out how to teach my children with patience and love. This may not be the most nuanced advice, but I ended up finding a strategy that worked for me. Each session I sat down with my children, I tried to pretend the whining, complaining, and sometimes eye-rolling children in front of me weren’t my kids. What would I do, I asked myself, if these were someone else’s children? Would I raise my voice or lose my temper? No, I wouldn’t. I would tell them calmly to get it together, I would redirect their focus, and I would get them back on track. I don’t know if that strategy would work for everyone, but I know it helped me practice more patience with my children in some of their most epic tantrums. With this strategy, I was able to take a step back whenever my children didn’t listen and think more objectively about how to approach them. It gave me a moment to see them as students having a difficult time rather than my children who wanted to push every button.

Back when I was homeschooling, I was privileged in many ways. I didn’t have to deal with some of the stressors that some parents are currently struggling with in these uncertain times. I wasn’t battling joblessness, a pandemic, or the complexity of online classes with schools. The technology I used with my children was rarely more complicated than a textbook or one simple computer program. Now, my children are both adults, and I work with students online every day. I talk to parents who are unsure about how to best support their children when they’re not being cooperative. Yes, you can try to imagine them as someone else’s kids. You can try to withhold some of the frustration and annoyance as you would for someone else’s child. But if you do find yourself slipping up and becoming annoyed, remember to take a moment to pause. These are unprecedented circumstances, and you, just like your child, deserve kindness. Something I wish I had done back in those days of homeschooling would have been to put less pressure on myself. I wish I had known that my kids didn’t have to learn everything at once. That honestly, even after hours of practice, they may not retain some things the next day because learning, for all ages, requires a lot of repetition. But mostly, I wish I had told myself, Shawn, just try your best with this. There is no perfection when it comes to homeschooling. Learning wasn’t going to happen for either of my children if I couldn’t first be patient with myself.

Shawn R. Jones

In many ways, our American culture likes to put people in boxes. We like to make categories so people, in all their complexity, can be more easy to understand. In many ways, these categories can be positive. They help us find communities with people who have similar experiences and beliefs. However, labels and boxes also have a long history of being used to oppress and limit people. “You can’t do that because you’re a girl,” or “[Insert identity here] people don’t do things like that.”

It’s human to forget that everyone is just as complex and multifaceted as we are. In a world that favors able-bodied people, some people who are frequently marginalized and tokenized are people with disabilities. People-first language strives to highlight that people are not solely their diagnoses. The linguistic decision to put someone’s personhood before their diagnosis attempts to combat the decades of discrimination people with disabilities have faced. Instead of “blind people” or “disabled,” person-first language advocates for “people who are blind” and “people with disabilities.” Categories and boxes frequently do not represent the full diversity of our humanity and in any way we can, we should strive to make the world a more accessible and welcoming place for all.

By The Tailored Tutoring LLC Writing Team

Staff Spotlight: Dolly Guzman, Owner of Dolly Guzman Educational Services

What first made you interested in education? How long have you been teaching?

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Marini inspired me to be an educator. The way that she made learning fun everyday was how I envisioned my career choice would be. She made me feel as if she was personally invested in me as a learner. One memory I treasured and utilized in my classroom when I became an educator was “Teacher of the Day.” She chose a student to teach the other students during morning meeting. I was chosen often and it instilled in me confidence, responsibility for my learning, and a sense of leadership within my peers. Mrs. Marini also shared her personal life by bringing her daughter and husband to the classroom on various occasions. This humanized her. I felt like her family, which is something that I instilled in my classroom as well. I wanted my students to know that we were all family. We were there for each other, responsible for each other academically and on a social/emotional level. I wanted my students to know that I was human, someone who makes mistakes and lives a normal life.

I have been an educator for 29 years. I got my first teaching job at the age of 14 at a day care center.

How has being bilingual impacted your career as an educator?

Being bilingual has had such a positive impact throughout my teaching career. It has afforded me many opportunities. I was capable of communicating with my families who didn’t speak English. I was able to make my families feel comfortable in an educational environment that can be extremely intimidating when you don’t speak or understand English. I also served as a translator for my fellow colleagues when there was a language barrier. When I participated as the general education teacher during child study team meetings and translated for parents, I saw that they needed someone to assist them in navigating this complicated and intimidating special education process. This is one of the reasons that inspired me to become a Learning Disabilities Teacher Consultant.

What advice do you have for parents and guardians who want to be the best advocates possible for their students?

My first statement to parents on the first day of school and my final statement that I placed at the end of my monthly newsletters was, “You are your child’s first teacher.” I would also tell them you are your child’s best advocate. You know your child best so you can be your child’s voice and advocate for them. Your partnership throughout their academic path is vital and essential in your child receiving the best education possible no matter if your child is in an urban or suburban school district. Trust your intuition. If something doesn’t feel right, ask questions. Remain respectful, graceful, steadfast, and vigilant when advocating for your child’s right to a free and appropriate education. Keep all documents and communication from the school as it pertains to your child. Most importantly, show up and be present, at all meetings, programs, and especially board of education meetings.

After working with such a variety of students for so many years, what are some of the benefits you’ve noticed with one-on-one tutoring?

After being in the classroom for so many years, I find that the best benefit with one-to-one tutoring is being able to teach a concept to mastery. In the classroom, the demands of meeting district and state mandates and timelines does not allow for teaching a concept to mastery. Many concepts are “flash-exposed” to students, taught within a few days and then assessed. Special education settings may be afforded some extra time but the demands of standardized assessments and fulfilling educator effectiveness evaluation goals affect the quality of instruction. Tutoring one-to-one allows me to teach my students a concept to mastery, utilizing various resources and evidence-based strategies, without the pressure of meeting timelines.

By The Tailored Tutoring LLC Writing Staff

In our in-person and online sessions, we have the pleasure of tutoring students from across South Jersey and the United States. Even though there is a push for American public schools to have the same educational opportunities and core standards for all children, there is still a discrepancy in how and what students learn based on where they live. When a third grade student in a wealthy suburb of South Jersey with a small class size struggles to grasp long division, her teacher may be able to fully address her needs within the class time or provide after school help. However, another third grader, equally hardworking and just a few towns over, may be in a school with larger class sizes and fewer resources. Perhaps, this student’s teacher is trying to juggle a classroom of dozens of children and isn’t able to address everyone’s questions before she has to move on to the next concept. Both students have dedicated teachers who are probably in a district that is striving toward state standards; however, many complicated factors impact a student’s success.

Our educational system in the United States is a product of years of redlining, discrimination, and funding issues. There’s an unfortunate fact that based on where children live, they may be in better performing public schools that challenge them more. An “A” student in one school district may find himself struggling to make the honor roll if he were to transfer to a high school less than 20 minutes away. How do we, as educators, help bridge the gap for students who are being adversely affected by generations of inequality? At TTLLC, we strive to teach students the fundamental skills that will help them succeed in the classroom and globally.

Two key benefits of one-on-one tutoring are that we are not pressured to teach toward a test and that students are not graded. We get to help students hone valuable skills until they feel confident enough to move to the next level. For example, if a high schooler needs help with her literature essay but is struggling with distinguishing sentences from fragments, we have the opportunity to teach her the foundational skills she will use for her current class and for the rest of her academic career. For every student, we focus on the foundations they’ll need not just to do well in one course, but to be prepared down the line as well.

There are many educators and school district administrators working tirelessly to close academic achievement gaps every day, and we all share the common belief that every student deserves the same educational opportunities. As an organization, our priority is to provide students from all communities with additional and affordable support they need to thrive.

By Tailored Tutoring’s Writing Staff

At Tailored Tutoring LLC, our students have diverse personalities, backgrounds, and learning styles. Our priority is to celebrate our students’ identities through education. With that goal in mind, our curriculum highlights books and assignments that prominently feature characters and people with a variety of identities. One book our students really enjoy is I Am Enough by Grace Byers and Keturah A. Bobo. I Am Enough is a colorful and inspiring tribute to diversity and community. This book for younger readers includes girls of different shades, sizes, religions, and ability levels. After reading I Am Enough, your child or student may want to talk more about what individuality and identity means to them. Even if children do not have the same vocabulary and language for some of these terms, they can see differences between themselves, their peers, and their families. In a world that sometimes equates differences with value, I Am Enough sends the positive message that our identities are what make us so incredible and that in every single way, they deserve to be celebrated!

By Tailored Tutoring’s Writing Staff

With language, people have the ability to communicate an array of complex ideas and emotions. But when our use of language goes beyond the need to express our thoughts, things can get murky. Based on how people speak, others make assumptions about ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and education, and these assumptions can translate into prejudice and oppression. Because of a long history of European colonization and cultural erasure, standardized English is expected and, in some places, demanded. In the United States, some people see a lack of adherence to a certain grammar code as a sign of ignorance or failing intelligence. But the history of language—because of its malleability, the United States’ thriving immigrant populations, and the de facto and de jure practices barring people of color from educational opportunities—is complicated.

One of the amazing things about our students and a strength of our organization is the diversity of languages they bring through our front door. In our one-on-one sessions, we encourage our students to speak their home language. If they were speaking to their mother or grandmother, how would they answer this essay question or explain this mathematical concept? We want our students to know that shame about their home language and how it differs from standardized English is a tool that people with power have used for generations to subjugate and malign others. We educate students to understand why certain languages and dialects are valorized and why others may be seen as lower class.

We strive to teach our students that how they speak is another aspect of their identity they can celebrate and share. We teach them to adapt their writing to the situation but an essay doesn’t mean they don’t bring their own personality, background, and voice to the page. What do we lose when students feel less smart because they don’t know the ins and outs of gerunds or split infinitives? What can we gain when students feel comfortable enough to bring their own approaches to language into the classroom and into their academics?

By Tailored Tutoring’s Writing Team

I’ve been teaching others to read for 30 years. At first, my role as an educator started with my younger siblings. I’d read word problems to them and teach them the complicated phonics of independent reading books. Through long division and bedtime stories, I not only educated my siblings, I got to know them as individuals. I learned that my brother loved to read about games, that my younger sister enjoyed mysteries, and my second eldest sibling couldn’t get enough of fantasy. When they read things they loved, they couldn’t put the books down.

When I had children of my own, I remembered the lesson my siblings taught me, educating shouldn’t be punishing, burdensome, or discouraging. It should be an act of love. When I sat with my own children, we read what they loved. We navigated through the mazes of libraries and bookstores, searching for video game guides and the newest YA series. And when I sit down with every student at Tailored Tutoring, I bring that same philosophy. When I educate, I have the opportunity to share what I love, but I also get the absolute pleasure to learn my students, too. Their passions, their concerns, their dreams. And that is why Tailored Tutoring is here. That is why we teach.

When I tutor, some of my students’ questions and thoughts genuinely surprise me. At ages as young as four-years-old, they wonder about money, politics, religion, and culture. One student, barely taller than the table we worked at, looked at me with sad eyes and said unprompted, “I don’t like my skin.” She explained that no one else in her family was as brown as her, and I could see how deflated she felt. We spent the rest of the lesson talking about her beauty and the prejudice of colorism. I talked with her mother after the session. “Yes,” she said with a deep sigh. “We’ve been having a lot of conversations lately. I don’t feel ready.”

As a parent and an educator, I know that feeling of being caught off-guard. On many occasions, my children have approached me with questions whose answers I could only fumble through. But there were some difficult conversations that I knew I wanted to address with my children early on. I wanted to talk to them about their heritage as multigenerational Black Americans. I wanted to tell them about slavery and equity. Even though my language when talking to my children about American history was simplified, I didn’t want to be indirect.

I remember my own elementary education and how textbooks erased so much of American history. And while I understand the desire to keep children shielded from the negativity of life, honest and open conversations about race, prejudice, and anything else do not have to be gruesome or scarring. Especially during the holiday season when discussions about the violence of colonization and indigenous people’s suffering is reduced to pictures of headdresses and pilgrim hats, it’s important to speak with our children directly. We can tell them that people have been hurt and continue to be hurt because of prejudice. That showing compassion and kindness toward other people doesn’t just mean pretending not to see different skin tones. We should tell them how for generations, people haven’t received the fair treatment they deserve.

Children are capable of hearing conflict and having difficult discussions. They hear them everyday in their TV shows, at school, and at home. I can’t say the right time to talk to children about these challenging topics because parents and guardians know their children best, but I do know that children, like adults, can learn and grow from speaking openly. I know that they think about prejudice before they sometimes have the language to express it, and I hope that as adults, we can help guide them through these bumps even when we’re still uncertain ourselves.

By Shawn R. Jones

Dear Tailored Tutoring,

Thank you for helping my daughter prepare for 6th grade at her new private junior high school with a rigorous math component. You provided her with a thorough assessment and filled in the gaps to prepare her at an advanced level! Most importantly, you gave the confidence and preparation that she needed to soar!

She’s loving her experience at her school, and she did amazingly well in her Algebra 1 class. In fact, she decided on her own accord to take Geometry (at a premier private high school over the summer) and now, because she’s so much more advanced in math than her peers, she’s on the 8th grade track. She is also hoping to start her own tutoring company for kids in our complex!

Your brilliant, patient and fun tutors are fantastic! I also want to thank you for making our geographic and time zone differences work. It was a seamless connection!

She just asked to come back to Tailored Tutoring again this semester because she loves the extra support and personalized attention! Thank you!!!!

~ Asha M.

At the beginning of January, children return to the classroom refreshed and, honestly, probably a little reluctant. For high schoolers and college students, January may mean exams. For elementary students, they could be returning to material that they haven’t seen since before break. How can your student start the year off strong?

1. Check in with the teacher: You’ve probably seen a progress report from the teacher with grades and comments before break, but January can also be a good time to follow up with your child’s teacher to see how you two can work as a team in a way that best benefits your student. If you need clarification or more details about what a teacher wrote in a progress report or explained at a busy back-to-school night, the start of January is an opportunity to ask before the making period gets hectic again.
2. Create a plan for the rest of the school year: You and your child may have had a plan in the beginning of September. Maybe they were going to read twenty minutes every day or going to try a new sport. How has the plan been working for your student? January can be a great time to take a pause and reevaluate. How can you both readjust your plan so that some subjects that need improvement get a little more attention?
3. Check in with your student:Returning to school can be a difficult transition after a week or so relaxing. Anxiety about grades, social life, and school may rise to the surface again. The start of a new year can be a great opportunity to ask your student how she’s doing, how she felt about the first few months of school, and how you can best help support her.

Between balancing work, school, and our social lives, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. How do we juggle the demands of daily life while maintaining our mental health? Sometimes it’s difficult to remember that becoming burnt out, or too exhausted to do much of anything, could be a message from our bodies that we need to take a break. Here are three strategies for people of all ages when the stress becomes too much and they need a moment to pause:

For many students, being back in school means the return of test anxiety. In some children, this may manifest as an upset stomach or even bad nerves that impact their test performance. How can we, as adults, help relieve some of our children’s fears around exams and assessments?

Provide context for your child:
Many children think that tests measure intelligence. If they don’t get a certain grade or percentage, children may feel insecure or inadequate. While tests may be an indicator of a child’s progress or how much they’ve grasped a certain skill, our intelligence cannot be reduced to a number. Educators around the world debate the efficacy of tests for students of diverse backgrounds and learning styles. Remind your children that tests are not the be-all and end-all when it comes to education. Many smart and innovative people struggle under the time constraints and pressures of an exam. The most important thing we can stress to our child is to try their best and to remember that no one’s worth or intelligence can be simplified to a letter grade.

Help your child prepare:
How does your child prefer to study? Do they enjoy using flashcards or making a study guide? Depending on the subjects, there are many resources online that can make studying less daunting for your child. Help them come up with habits that work for them by trying out a variety of study methods. Some students prefer to highlight as they read, others like to stand up and move when they practice their multiplication facts. It can take years for a student to develop a system that works best for them, so be patient and encourage your child to try new approaches.

Communication with teachers:
For younger students in a smaller classroom, it may be easier for a teacher to notice when a student is fidgeting or having a hard time with a test. But in larger classrooms, it may be a challenge for the teacher to check in with every individual student. Additionally, students may feel less comfortable speaking up and sharing their anxieties around their peers. For younger students, it’s helpful if parents or guardians communicate to the teacher any concerns they may have that will affect their child’s experiences in the classroom. It’s also essential that the students talk to the instructor directly, but this may be more difficult with children in elementary and middle school. In high school and in college, professors have more of an expectation that students will communicate clearly about their experiences in the classroom. No matter what age your student is, teachers can be great resources and advocates to turn to when test anxiety strikes.