Great Stories
Montana Campus Corps:
College Students Meeting Critical Community Needs
On Tutoring by Dustin Stoltz

Among the substantive areas that people tend to serve, it is education that takes on the false attribute of being somehow less urgent. It seems so because the results of our successes or short-comings as teachers and tutors only manifest themselves some years down the road. Urgency is jet fuel for passion, but when the narrative asserts the task can be left ‘till tomorrow, fiery conviction is also left un-ignited. It is for this reason that I can’t express enough gratitude for the tutors in our program that stand out with passion. They cast aside the most basic assumption that buries the budding student, the assumption that struggling to learn is really just lacking in diligence.

These tutors “go above and beyond”; tutoring isn’t just a job, a line on a resume or something to pass the time. Tutoring these children is a duty. Each achievement for their tutee is an achievement for them. Even though they are reluctant to stop at the closing of the school year, they are glad to take with them a variation on the perspective they came into the program with. For me it was that moment that certain clichés became epiphanies, “children are our future”, “we are all in this together”, “our fate is bound up”. They each become undeniably true.

When tutors fall into this space, they began to realize the intricate network that binds us, the complexity that paints the picture of our world they have seen their whole lives and their place within it. One tutor, one child, one hour a week becomes nearly one-hundred and fifty children served each year in our community. In the same way the smallest educational disparity early on can be exacerbated over the years, the smallest improvement can alter the course of that students education entirely– even if it was only a bit of confidence.

The tutors that realize this are the life-blood of all tutor programs. After two years of co-coordinating the America Reads*America Counts program in Bozeman, I am convinced that tutoring isn’t about the big grandiose educational paradigms or pedagogical frameworks. It isn’t about slaving to overcome learning disabilities and paining over a lack of progress. It may seem slow, you may not seem to move at all. It’s true; there is a great sense of accomplishment when your student works through a problem by herself or he reads a paragraph unaided. It is also true that the smallest gesture of encouragement will be part of the biography of a successful young adult.

To every tutor and teacher, keep the construction paper thank-you notes and smile, tomorrow will be a good day thanks, in no small part, to you.



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