Jason Moon - PACT Reflection #1


Rapid Progress in Math

Sunita Gupta

sunita@oneinmath.com

09/23/2015

This was my third of many visits to OneInMath sessions, and it has definitely been a rewarding experience for me so far. I've been assigned five kids, named Diego, Tam, Kevin, Matthew, and Esther, ranging in grade level from kindergarten to third grade and in math skill level. Before I came to this organization, I had a preconception in my mind that I would be tutoring a bunch of underprivileged kids who went to school where they learned only a fraction of what they could have in better schools. This preconception turned out to be true in some ways and false in others. The kids that I'm tutoring aren't necessarily underprivleged in that they live in poverty; they generally have dedicated parents who care about their education, which is why their parents send them to this program in the first place. However, based on what I've seen, the kids aren't really getting the full attention that they need at school in order to have a solid foundation for basic arithmetic, which is absolutely necessary for any more complex math. For example, Diego came into the program not knowing what 1 + 1 is, a problem that most kids learn in preschool. This is where volunteers such as myself step in and give the kids more intensive practice in order to build their mathematical foundations. I have already seen considerable progress in the kids that I tutor in three weeks. Diego, who didn't know 1+1 at the beginning, is now doing problems that involve adding up to 4 to small numbers. The other kids have also shown similar rates of improvement, and it has been really rewarding for me to see the kids building their math foundations so rapidly. I look forward to the rest of the year, helping these kids out.