Bearcat Buddies
Fall 2014
For the first semester of my time at the University of Cincinnati, I volunteered my time tutoring at Roll Hill Academy -- a school for students from preschool to the 8th grade. During this semester, I worked with a fifth grade student, who was very eager to learn and a great deal of fun to be around. My student was very receptive to learning the material that we covered, and would get frustrated when he could not quite grasp something that we were going over. It was a very rewarding experience to work with him, because he really did enjoy being in school, and despite having some trouble in getting the grades that he wanted, was always making an effort to keep working hard to do as well as he could. I enjoyed being able to not only help him work through the math-focused practice that we were doing, but also helping him raise his confidence so that he could excel in his studies.
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Fall 2015After taking a semester off from the Bearcat Buddies Program because of a class schedule that conflicted with the available volunteering times, I was excited to return to Roll Hill Academy in the first semester of my sophomore year to work with another 5th grade student in math. Unfortunately, my student this semester was not as engaged or excited about learning as the student that I had last fall. Often tired and lethargic, my student was frequently lacking in the willpower to even begin the problems that we were to attempt. Even when he did muster up some energy to try and solve a problem or better understand a concept, it was often without a great deal of focus that he did so. Thus, volunteering as a Bearcat Buddy was a different and more challenging experience, but a rewarding one nonetheless. I learned early into the semester that my role was not so much in developing specific knowledge of concepts with my student, but more so in developing a heightened level of excitement about learning. Because of this, I worked often to make learning more fun for my student, opting to play games that tested and built upon his knowledge instead of worksheets. By the end of the semester, the improvements that he had made in his confidence and level of energy were a sign of future progress to come for my student, and I am glad to have had the opportunity to work with him and see him shine.
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Fall 2016I spent my third semester with the Bearcat Buddies Program in the fall of my last year as a UC undergraduate. Instead of tutoring at Roll Hill Elementary, as in years past, this semester I worked out of Hays-Porter Elementary School. My experience during this semester of Bearcat Buddies tutoring has been different than in semesters past in that I was focused on a number of different students as opposed to one single student for the entire course of the semester. While I was initially assigned to one student for the semester, this student was not always at school on the days that I came in to tutor. This meant that I found myself tutoring a number of different students during the course of the semester. This experience was challenging, in part because it meant that I was not able to form the kind of long term bond that I had with earlier students that really allowed me to connect and make what I thought was a more impactful difference. Even so, I believe that the experience was worthwhile in that it afforded me the opportunity to interact with, teach, and encourage a number of different students with different learning styles. Working with different students kept me on my toes, and helped me to adapt my tutoring to fit students' individual needs. In this way, my semester with Bearcat Buddies taught me a great deal about teaching, and has thus furthered my desire to incorporate teaching into my career.
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Spring 2016
I spent my final semester before graduation again with the Bearcat Buddies Program. In this last semester of tutoring, I returned to Cincinnati Public Schools to tutor in math and reading.