Tutor Corps

In one chair sits a senior from a suburban high school, full of new-won know-how in math, afire with the impulse to do something "meaningful." In the next chair sits a small slum kid, who flunked arithmetic in his big and unruly second-grade class last year. The kid needs some of what the senior has, and he's getting it. Such, in essence, is tutoring, this summer's nationwide channel for student idealism.

Few high school students are skilled teachers; few could handle a class. But face-to-face with one or two students, the young tutors find that they can readily impart knowledge, enthusiasm for learning and--by their presence--a model of scholastic achievement.

"Won & One." This week tutoring projects, variously combining slum children of many scholastic shortcomings with tutors ranging in age up to young housewives, are in full cry everywhere from Boston's Chestnut Hill to North western University to San Francisco. Cleveland's "Summer '64 Tutor Corps" is probably the nation's most effective application of the idea. There 535 high school students are tutoring without pay in 62 locations around the city. More than half of the tutors (average age: 17) are girls, and each tutor works about 15 hours a week under paid supervisors from Cleveland's school system. Sessions, which usually last an hour and a half, are held in Y.M.C.A.s, libraries, churches, civic clubs and community centers.

At East End Neighborhood House, where 14 pupils sit down at small tables around a large room, the atmosphere is casual but quiet. Each tutor has developed her own teaching methods. At one table a white boy and a Negro girl, with a tutor, play a game of homonyms, thinking up and writing down such words as "knew and new," "won and one," "two and too." At another table a tutor helps a boy with flash cards to increase his word-recognition speed.

Barbara Danforth, 15, a Negro girl in the academically talented group at John Adams High School, helps to test a white boy in reading comprehension. Richard Malitz, 16, an eleventh-grade student at Shaker Heights High School who admits that he is "pretty good" in math and science, tests himself. "I think I want to be an engineer," he says, "but I wanted to try tutoring to see if I'd be fit for teaching instead."

Teachers & Companions. All the children call their tutors by their first names. There is no discipline problem because the kids are excited at the notion of having high school students as their teachers and companions. One boy, shy and withdrawn, had trouble with arithmetic. For a week his tutor could make no progress with him; then one day the kid came in with a sheet of arithmetic problems he had found somewhere and worked out by himself.

"The children get to know and like high school people who enjoy learning, and we feel that this is important in raising their educational sights," says Mrs. Mary Stevens, East End Neighborhood House supervisor. "We hope this change in attitude will carry over when they return to their schools."

Volunteers & Requests. Cleveland's Tutor Corps was established by former Peace Corpsman Robert B. Binswanger, 34. After meeting Cleveland parent and teacher groups, chapters of high school honor societies and student councils, he concluded that tutoring was feasible, got $20,000 from the Jennings Foundation. He received requests for help for 5,000 youngsters from 98 of Cleveland's elementary schools. Applications to work as tutors came from every Cleveland high school, prep school and parochial school, each prospective tutor being recommended by a school official on the basis of academic achievement.

"I was anxious to prove that high school students are capable of performing a valuable social and educational service if given the chance," says Binswanger. "It would also give a lot of potential teachers an opportunity to see that the real excitement in teaching is in the city--that it is not to be found in the green fields of suburbia." Supervisors report that kids sit outside after sessions discussing what their tutors are wearing, how they speak, what their interests are. Says Binswanger: "The reason this program is good is that the children are made acutely aware that there is somebody who cares."

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