Great Stories
Montana Campus Corps:
College Students Meeting Critical Community Needs
Gus and Max by Julia Lippert

Last year I tutored two elementary students in math and occasionally other subjects. I met each student for a half hour twice a week. The two boys, were almost opposites in personality. Gus* was very shy, guarded, very serious, a diligent worker, who picked things up quickly. He was in the program because his family was homeless moving from hotel to temporary housing frequently. He was struggling in school because he was absent so much. My other student, Max*, was outspoken, trusting, mischievous, constantly testing boundaries, curious about everything except schoolwork. He hated school , hated his teacher and could not understand why learning school work mattered in real life. He had to constantly be coaxed to focus on the material, and was in grave danger of failing the standardized math test that would determine if he could advance to the next grade.
I felt rewarded to reach a milestone at the end of the year with both boys. When I started tutoring Gus in the fall, his teacher had made a two inch folder containing lessons he had missed. Little by little we finished every one of them, in addition to all the new ones that were added as he missed more school days. However, I was even more gratified by another one of his successes. At the end of the year, there was a swim party for the students in the program, their families, and their tutors. The pool was full of boisterous kids, splashing, leaping, and lunging on swim noodles. Gus was playing by himself in the very shallow water. I joined him and we talked and fooled around, under the fountain and throwing a ball. I found out that he couldn’t swim. I expected very little, but I thought I would see what if anything I could teach him. First I got a couple of swim noodles, and in water shallow enough for him to lie his stomach and touch the bottom with his arm, we floated on the noodles. He got comfortable with that in a couple of minutes. I gradually got him to get comfortable with floating with less and less support. I was shocked to find that in a mere half hour he had gone from knowing nothing about swimming, to being able to float independently. This was the shy boy, who when asked a simple question about his day or his weekend was scared to give anything but the most generic answer for fear that it was the wrong one. He had been brave enough and trusting enough to master something so intimidating so quickly. I was so proud of him, and was truly touched that he felt comfortable enough with me to do so.
Max’s success was a bit different. When I began working with him, he was getting scores of 20% on his math work. I discovered that although he knew how to do the arithmetic, line up, stack up, and add subtract or multiply the numbers, he was rarely motivated enough to follow through for an entire problem, let alone a worksheet of them. He didn’t enjoy the work, or care about the result. He didn’t realize how much he knew and believed he was slow and dumb. But he was happy to get out of class for a half hour, away from his teacher and chat with me a bit. Although he didn’t enjoy the math, he would bear with me for a little while, and then soon resort to trying to distract me with questions or some other scheme. And I would humor him a bit and then refocus him. We did this over and over again for as much as the half hour as he was able to be productive. His father and grandfather had found that bribing him with expensive gifts was temporarily effective in motivating him, however I certainly could not do so. He was interested in iPhones, dirt bikes, $100 bills, playing Halo. However, I found that he would do almost anything for a few stickers. He liked cheerful simple ones, with encouraging words, pink flowers, happy smiles. One sticker was okay, but to ‘break the rules’ and give him 5, or a whole sheet, made his day. Little by little he brought his practice test scores started to creep up. He started tackling geometry and word problems. Every once in a while he decided to focus for the majority of a practice test with his teacher, so amongst the 35% there were the occasional 60%’s. He started to believe in his abilities and started calling many math problems easy. “I know that one” he would say, and he did. In the last month before the big test his teacher started to hope that maybe he could pass the test. He still performed inconsistently, but he was close. And so I urged him to treat the official test a bit differently. I urged him that on that one day, on that one test, to make a true effort. He had been testing me all year. He wanted someone who was a straight shooter. He asked me about the behavior, motivations, and feelings of the school staff. He wanted someone who liked him no matter how he behaved and I found him charming. He always made me smile and I looked forward to working with him. And so I hoped that I held enough sway with him, that he really would try hard enough on that one day to apply everything he had learned. Although the results of the test weren’t available till mid-summer, and I didn’t find out till I worked with him the next fall, I am happy to say he passed the test and is doing markedly better in his new class.
• Not his real name


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