We’re so proud of our teens, many of whom work as Teen Tutors in their clubhouses. Alvi, age 17, have been a teen tutor for a year. He recently shared his personal experience in a thoughtful essay.

“As a Teen Tutor, I worked with younger members who needed help with Math and Literature. In math, I worked with children who needed help with addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, shapes, graphs, and percents. For Literature, I worked with children who summarized what they read for homework, answering questions about characters, spelling words, and defining words.

Teen Tutor Alvi works with a young scholars

Based on my experience, I think a tutor needs to have patience. If someone were not patient, it would be difficult teaching children who are the ages of 6-10 because most are not that capable of grasping certain concepts quick enough. I also think that to be a tutor, you should be creative enough to approach a situation differently every time because not all students learn the same way.

My favorite part of being a Teen Tutor was watching explorers learn from me and come back to me when they needed help with another topic. If an explorer knew how to approach the topic he was struggling with after I tutored him, I felt as if I did my role as a tutor right. The explorers that I enjoyed working with were the ones who actually wanted to learn and wanted me to help them rather than giving them the answers. Even working with the ones who were always distracted taught me a valuable lesson because I had to get them to focus on their work by trying a different tactic.”

Alvi helped BCNY explorers learn their letters and numbers, but also provided positive male role modeling and demonstrated our 4 C’s: Competence, Confidence, Character, and Connectedness. Thank you Alvi!