Tufts Literacy Corps
Clubs are a great way to get involved on campus! It’s a chance to meet people outside of your classes and friends who have shared interests with you. Clubs can help build a sense of community and belonging, and I want to share one of the clubs that I’m in on campus. Tufts Literacy Corps is the America Reads/America Counts program at Tufts University. I actually found this club because the director of the program reached out to me during my sophomore year. Since then, I have been a part of this club during the academic year and even in the summer.
The Tufts Literacy Corps pairs Tufts students with local elementary and middle school students to tutor math and reading. I have younger siblings, so I was used to tutoring younger students. However, the difference was that I knew my siblings and how they study. Working with new students allowed me to become a better tutor in that I had to assess their preferred style of studying and how I can help them effectively. My sophomore year, the first year in the club, I was paired up with a 4th grade student to tutor reading. We met at the Tisch library twice a week and we worked on homework for her English class and read books together. It was very rewarding to see my tutee improving her skills and she even told me her grades went up in her English class. Though a tutor can stay with their original pairing, some tutors get paired up with a different student throughout the year for various reasons.
I was next paired up with a 6th grade student and I'm actually still working with him. I began tutoring him my junior fall and over this summer and plan to tutor him until I graduate in May this year. He has shown tremendous improvements from when I began tutoring him. Despite some gaps and difficulties he has in math, he is able to do math problems correctly with more confidence. Whenever I run into a problem with tutoring, the weekly meetings with the director and other tutors help to talk through the problems and come up with some solutions. This has helped me improve myself as a tutor and make the tutoring sessions productive. The tutoring sessions are often energetic and the tutees even sometimes tell me it was fun to do the math. I recently got paired up with another student last month, so I am currently tutoring two students in math. I enjoy tutoring my tutees because not only is it rewarding to see them improve, it is also a way to give back to the community. If you want to learn more about the club, you can check out their website here: https://sites.tufts.edu/tuftsliteracycorps/