Around 90-94% of students at FLC graduate on time. That number might seem large, but out of 871 current students, that means 801 will graduate on time, leaving 70 to either be held back a grade or drop out. For each grade, 18 of your friends will not be going to college with you. Most of the staff want that number to go down and one option is to require tutoring. Requiring tutoring is not a new idea. More than 5 schools across the nation have this system for kids with failing grades. It also seems to work.
According to DSST Public Schools. “The few hours of extra help is proving to be a great way to improve learning outcomes and reduce overall frustration for students and schools around the country. By maintaining extra support, more and more schools are helping students regain their footing, while still keeping the classroom rigorous.”
But would mandatory tutoring help the students at FLC? Frances Peagler, a teacher at FLC, certainly thinks so. She said, “I think we should have more tutoring. I think that we also should have students who do well on the subject…help to tutor them.”
FLC’s current policy on a failing grade is for the teacher to try to help as much as they can, and that includes tutoring. Nicole Lee says, “We offer tutoring in most of the core content classes and most if not all teachers are willing to tutor students if they set up appointments with the teachers.” Since most teachers are willing to tutor students if they set up appointments, it’s up to the students to take a step in the right direction. That’s where the problem is found.
Xavier Barton, a freshman at FLC, doesn’t like tutoring. He says, “When I get home, I just lay down and say I’ll do [my homework] and then I never end up doing it.” He believes his grades wouldn’t benefit from it so why bother.
Even though some students don’t think they would benefit from tutoring, Ms. Peagler believes that every student with a failing grade should have mandatory tutoring no matter the cause. She says, “[Tutoring] should be required…if the students are failing because they don’t understand the information. If it’s because they are not attending then…I think we need to have conversations with parents to make sure the parents are aware of our policies, that the parents know that their students aren’t attending on a consistent basis or coming in late. And I think that they should be required to go to tutoring, as well.”
Some people, like Xavier, dislike the current tutoring situation and feel that it is not needed, saying “I don’t go to tutoring because at the end I always end up bringing my grades back up and tutoring is kinda boring.”
Even though tutoring can be boring, it’s needed for some students to graduate. Mandatory tutoring is very hard to get off the ground and that is why we need everybody, teachers, students, and parents, to step up and give the students the help they need.
Kamila Vargas • Jan 20, 2020 at 1:05 am
I agree that tutoring should be mandatory for students failing classes. Although not all students think that tutoring is fun or a good idea at all, they would benefit from it. It would also be better for students to tutor other students. Most students get bored of what their teachers say, it tends to get repetitive after a while of not understanding the same lesson. Having someone around your age teaching you the same material would be more effective than having some teacher read you the same lesson plan out of an old textbook. They might have a better way of helping you really absorb the knowledge. They would use some of the same vocabulary as the student to make it easier, instead of using words they would have to look up in the dictionary. Also, students are more likely to listen to someone they know than a teacher.