Courtesy photo: Tutor helping St. Michael’s middle school student prepare for final exam in math.
Free SAT Preparation Tutoring at the City Teen Center
By Louise Yakey
Everyone has had the experience of feeling lost in a class. Tutoring provides the one-on-one and small group guidance that students of all ages find beneficial. For K-12 students Arise Tutors works closely with the students and their families and teachers to provide guided practice with current and upcoming coursework. Because the CEO is a licensed teacher, she understands the importance of preparation for each tutoring session and has access to important resources available to educators. While a tutoring session can be homework help, Arise anticipates and prepares for the standards-based instruction students receive in school. The tutors are guided by the CEO to use the state standards. For example, the students who received tutoring help this summer benefited from preparation for their upcoming school year. Generally, the students did not have summer work so the tutor prepared materials to give the students a boost-up for the coming year. It is exciting to think that the students stayed in touch with formal learning for an hour or two each week and they are prepared for their new math and/or reading lessons.
Arise Tutors also works with those students who did not graduate from high school and are opting to take the GED exams for their high school graduation equivalency. While there is excellent GED instruction at most colleges or other agencies, some GED students need the accountability of a dedicated tutor to get through the preparation for the rigorous GED tests. Since most GED participants left high school before they received the full curriculum of instruction, those students are learning many math, reading & writing, science and history concepts for the first time. They need a skilled GED tutor who can customize their lessons based on which concepts are new to them. Since the GED exams can be different from the types of exams they took in high school, the students need strategies to “crack the code” of passing these rigorous exams. A trained, experienced tutor provides this type of guidance. Many students finish the GED feeling like they are now a good test taker and are ready for college level work.
Starting August 13, Arise Tutors will be offering free SAT preparation at the new City of Santa Fe Teen Center near the Southside Library. Arise employs a variety of exciting tutors with a wide range of experience including those that have been teaching high school and college math or reading and writing for their entire career to tutors who recently took the SAT for college admission. All tutors are either teachers or professors already teaching or are college students pursuing teaching as a career. The city is generously providing the stipends for the tutors and underwriting the cost of the study manuals so the SAT instruction is free to all participants. The August cohort is intended for seniors retaking the SAT that they took in 11th grade and the November cohort is intended for juniors taking the SAT for the first time in the spring. This free tutoring is an opportunity that many families could not otherwise afford. Commercial online tutoring is upwards of $7650. Thank you to the City of Santa Fe for making this important tutoring available to all our students!
Courtesy photo: Aspring teacher working with student during summer program at Ramirez Thomas Elementary
While there is a trend to de-emphasize testing in education, the SAT exam is required by the state of New Mexico for most high school students and is encouraged by many universities and scholarship programs. Classroom instruction is important for SAT preparation but SAT testing skills are specialized and often not taught in regular high school classes. The official SAT website (https://www.collegeboard.org/) recommends that students study 6-8 hours to increase their score 90 points and that 20 hours of study is associated with a score gain of 115 points. With an average score of 885 in New Mexico and a score of 1200 to 1400 recommended for most scholarships, the free tutoring offered at the Teen Center will help interested students to increase their scores to a much more competitive level.
Arise also offers online tutoring for those students who prefer to study from home for the GED, SAT, and K12 general education. Many parents/guardians/mentors appreciate the online opportunity to participate in the tutoring sessions in the effort to support the student outside of school and the tutoring session. Arise makes every effort to ensure that anyone needing tutoring can access it by offering tutoring in a variety of venues including online. Package discounts, group pricing, and scholarships are available for one-on-one and small group tutoring.
Every tutoring session includes effective time management, organizational and study skills strategies. We often find that the missing link for students is organizing their work and learning. Test preparation strategies can be challenging to foster in a classroom of students. The one-on-one guidance given to students in tutoring sessions gets students ready to study content for exams.
This is a wonderful opportunity to share testimonials from parents. One parent of a student Arise tutors online said that tutoring “gave evenings back to the family by decreasing homework time stress in the household”. Another parent texted to say that her daughter, going into 9th grade, “actually looks forward to her tutoring sessions and her sense of dread about math is gone!” The mom of a GED student is so excited that her daughter “is now able to look for work and move her life forward”. The student could not get through the math portion of the GED without the tutoring as she did not attend high school. She is enrolling in college in January and will be working full-time beginning this fall.
Anyone interested in learning more about private tutoring or participating in the free SAT tutoring, should contact the Arise Tutors CEO, Louise Yakey, MS, MPA, Ed.S. at louiseyakey@arisetutors.com or 315-552-8205 (cell).
Courtesy photo: Tutor helping student understand scholarship application questions
Louise Yakey, MS, MPA, Ed.S. is CEO of Arise Tutors. She is also the health careers teacher at Ortiz Middle School in Santa Fe. Arise Tutors provides high-quality tutoring for all ages including K-12, GED, SAT and nursing school math.