Teens tutor peers online to fill need during pandemic
SANTA FE, N.M. — When her suburban Dallas high school was forced to move online last spring because of the coronavirus pandemic, Charvi Goyal realized that the schoolmates she’d been informally tutoring between classes would still need extra help but wouldn’t necessarily be able to get it. So she took her tutoring online, as well.
Goyal, a 17-year-old high school junior from Plano, roped in three classmates to create TutorScope, a free tutoring service run by high schoolers for other kids, including younger ones. What started with a handful of instructors help- ing friends’ siblings in their hometown has blossomed into a group of 22 tutors from Texas, Arizona, and Ohio that has helped more than 300 students from as far away as South Korea.
“I co u ld foresee that schools were going to go virtual. And with that there were a couple of problems because the interactions between students and stu- dents, and students and teachers would be weak- ened,” Goyal said.
TutorScope provides the one-on-one support that teachers have traditionally given while roving the aisles of their classrooms but now often can’t because of the time and technology constraints posed by online schooling.
On a night near the end of the fall semester, tutor Avi Bagchi worked with 7-year- old twins Monika and Massey Newman on a reading com- prehension lesson about discerning between fact and opinion. During their halfhour video chat, the 16-yearold Plano West Senior High School student provided the
children from nearby Corinth with examples — it’s a fact that the pen is red but an opinion if one doesn’t like it — and reined them in when they got off topic a bit: Can’t it be a fact that someone holds an opinion?
“I love candy. That’s a fact ...” said Massey, “... because it’s true,” he and his sister said in unison.
Their mother, social worker Sarah Newman, said the twins’ TutorScope sessions have been really help- ful and have freed up her and her 17-year-old son to focus on their own work.
“With these tutors, I real- ize they have time,” she said. “I think they are very patient with these younger kids, which I do not even have as a mother. I have patience in other things, (but) I don’t have patience in teaching.”
Newman discovered Tutor- Scope a few weeks into the fall semester on Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social media app, and signed up her twins for sessions, which can be up to an hour each week per subject.
“At the time I was even looking for tutoring for them, like private tutoring, and every spot that I hit was too
costly for those two kids. I’m like, I can’t afford it,” Newman said.
TutorScope isn’t the first nonprofit to offer online tutoring and is just one of the workarounds people have come up with to educate kids during the pandemic, from a teacher in Nigeria who grades homework from around the world to a so-called sidewalk school in Mexico that offers online instruction to children, including some stuck at the border awaiting decisions on U.S. asylum requests.
What makes the TutorScope effort unique is the bond between the teenage volunteers and the peers they’re helping.
“We kind of want to keep the whole ‘for students by students’ thing really prominent since it provides a sort of solidarity. Because everyone is going through the same thing, you know that your tutor is also having the same struggles learning right now that you are,” Goyal said.
The group accepts donations from adults but limits volunteers to students, including at least one college undergrad.
with hospice
Chaplain Elias Mena (left) prays for a COVID-19 patient placed on comfort care as registered nurse Nikki De La Cruz monitors the patient Jan. 15 in L.A.
kill people by the hundreds of thousands. Close to 400,000 people have died in the U.S. alone.
Holy Cross is filled with so many COVID-19 patients that it has had to double up some people in intensive care rooms and put others in areas normally reserved for outpa- tient care and patient recovery. A makeshift area at the end of a even been turned into a hospi- tal room.
Deegan and about a dozen other chaplains cover shifts that extend to 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
As Chaplain Anne Dauchy prays for a woman during her last moments, patient’s loved ones watching through Dauchy’s iPad can be heard sobbing in the background and saying words like, “I love you so much, Mamma” and “Thank you for everything.’”
“We try to kind of reframe what a miracle is,” an exhausted Dauchy says afterward. “Sometimes it’s living another day, sometimes it’s a patient opening their eyes.
“Perhaps that’s miracle, that she’s at rest and at peace and not suffering anymore,” she says of the woman who died.
When asked how he, Dauchy and the others manage to survive the turmoil emotionally, Deegan replies, “That’s a good question. I have to be honest. I don’t know.”
What he know is when he saw nurses and other hospital staff risking their own lives to do everything they could to save others he felt he had to be there, right in the room with them, to offer comfort and be a surrogate for their loved ones who couldn’t be there.
He was sure he’d eventually be infected as COVID-19 patients began pouring into the hospital every day. So far he has not, just last week he had his second dose of the vaccine.
“Who knew PPE really works,” he said with a chuckle during a rare lighthearted moment as he discussed the personal protective equipment he dons each day before work.
On that Monday when 11 people died, including three he personally ministered to, Deegan went home and, after he to fall asleep, saw the faces and again heard the voices of people who had sobbed and screamed at him, “Why? Why? Why?”