Before School Mentoring

Instead of having a homeroom at the start of the school day, my mentor teacher and I would offer assistance to students who were struggling in math. Every grade level was allowed to come for extra help and we allowed this time to also let students of ours finish tests. Tutoring started at 7:30 in the morning and would go till 8:20, a few minutes before 1st period. It was a great experience for me because I remember feeling that I helped a lot of students during the Fall semester and it was good to help them when I came back. I liked it a lot because I was able to see a lot of my students that I had and also got to help the students I had helped previously in the year. The level of comfortableness was already there, so the students did not hesitate to ask any questions.

On certain days we would only have a few students come up that needed help, and with me being there, it allowed for my mentor teacher to catch up on any material he may have been behind on. On the days of few students, I was pretty much in control helping students in 6th-8th grade with any type of math problems. Unfortunately this was not always the case for us. Some days were very rough because we would have 20-25 students who needed our help. This occurred often on test days and it became very difficult when we needed to print notes off for the students who have missed previous days. Having two people helping twenty some students was very hard on us, so I could only imagine how tough it would have been if it was just my mentor teacher. This really put my management skills to the test and also helped me to determine how much help I should be giving on certain problems. Students always wanted the easy way out and answers, but I would try and push them to figure it out with me as a guide by their side. This became very difficult when multiple students needed help, but it was nice to be tested on that ground.

A way my mentor teacher figured out how to help us on days with a lot of students, was he allowed a student or two in Algebra to help us with the students. This was a great help because they were able to fill us in on what some common problems were for the Algebra students who were coming in to get help. We had to closely monitor everything because sometimes the helpers would start having conversations that were off topic with their friends. My mentor teacher seemed to really grasp this and would ask the students to leave if they were not working on anything. He showed his classroom management by enforcing this rule and making sure that all the students knew about it. A great thing he did was, he would allow for his students to come in as early as 7:00 for help because he was normally there. So there were some days I would be in earlier than 7:30 to provide him with as much help as I could. Overall I felt I helped a lot of students and also helped out my mentor teacher. The experience was great and can see it being used in my own classroom to help further my students' education.