Please Help My Grades Now

FREE Online instructions for elementary students facing challenging issues

Ms. Bearden

"Every Child Can Learn!!"
        This is my philosophy. It has been proven that just as we mature differently, we learn differently. Let me show you one more way to master the educational concepts of Math, Reading, and more

    "Please Help My Grades" is an educational instruction video collection specially-designed to assist learning comprehension in the classroom; dealing with such subjects as Math, Science and English. Over the months there will be specific instructions on the daily problems students encounter in today's classroom.
      Although your instructor is an 18-year veteran in elementary education, "Please Help My Grades" should not be construed as the epitome for classroom instructions, but should be used only to enhance the student's scholastic pursuits.
     "Please Help My Grades" is an ideal instrument for home-schooling, vacation schools and especially for the child who faces a learning challenge on a particular subject.
                   Ms. Natasha Bearden
                  (Online Instructor)

Teachers as Tutors
    Let’s look first at elementary and middle school options:
A: teachers staying after school to help students. On the plus side, there is nothing more effective than an exceptional teacher forging a lasting bond with a student.
    These bonds are rooted in academic support, guidance, and mentoring. There are numerous touching testimonials of low-income students who have overcome obstacles to achieve success due in part to the guidance of a caring teacher.
    There is no substitute for the kind of influence a dedicated teacher can have. These relationships should be cultivated whenever possible. They are special and as such, rare – even for the best teachers, who can be in short supply at many schools in impoverished communities.

Love to Learn

    Teaching is tiring, and it’s only human to burn out after a long day at an under-resourced school. We’d be asking too much if we expected teachers to pick up all of the tutoring slack. Plus, meeting after school with a teacher requires initiative on the part of the student, teacher, or both.
    If tutoring isn’t mandatory or at least incenticized, it’s unrealistic to expect a critical mass of students to attend after school tutoring sessions with teachers. Therefore, having teachers act as tutors is not a strategy that is likely to meet the needs of the majority of students.     While teacher performing tutoring services should be encouraged, it cannot be relied upon.

The Homework Club
    Option B - a homework club, presents a host of problems. “Homework club” is a generic name for multiple variations of the same thing, groups of students attending a kind of study hall run by untrained instructors.
    Homework clubs usually come as part of an after-school program, and the quality suffers.     The instructors may be volunteer or paid college student tutors, or just adults who work part time. Regardless, the volunteers are usually untrained and minimally qualified as actual tutors, serving more as supervisors than anything else.
    Moreover, after-school programs have high student-instructor ratios, typically about 20-1, and almost never as low as 10-1. Students typically just bring whatever homework they were assigned that day in math, English, science, or history.
    Students may call on teachers for help, but with 30 students to monitor and only one hour to tutor in, the amount of actual tutoring that goes on is negligible. There’s a lot of crowd control as students socialize while doing their homework. The good students do a thorough job like they normally would, and the weaker students fall into their normal habits as well. In other words, nothing changes.
    If we accept this status quo, then our students will continue to suffer. It’s not easy to break the cycle of generational poverty, but providing high quality education programs for low-income youth is a good way to start. As I will show in my next piece, schools can replace ineffective homework clubs with high quality tutoring without great difficulty or cost.

10 year-old Keynote Speaker

It is endless what a child can do if constructively motivated...
This young man, Dalton Sherman, was only 10 years old when he delivered this astounding keynote speech... all from sheer memory and inspiration...

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Reaching Urban Students

How to Teach Low Income Students to Achieve
    Encouraging achievement for low income students results in academic success.
    Educating low income students can sometimes be a difficult task when you want to teach them how to achieve. These students face hardships in their daily lives that can put them in a disadvantaged position in the classroom. However, there are steps that you an take to encourage achievement in school and in life. Providing access to resources, positive role models and activities outside of the classroom all result in heightened rates of achievement.

Instructions
1 - Encourage achievement in the classroom. Become a positive role model by inspiring your students to succeed in their education and lives. Effectively guide them through their schoolwork, ensuring that they are learning along the way. Understand the difficulties and disadvantages that your low income students may face and accommodate them accordingly. However, do not let your empathy be mistaken for apathy or leniency. Make sure that it is clear that you care about their individual success.
2. - Encourage students to participate in extracurricular activities. Studies show that participation in activities such as sports, music, arts, leadership groups and interest-based organizations positively affect academics.     Decreased absences, higher grade point averages and increased math and reading scores are all higher among students who participate in extracurricular activities
1). Low income students that participate in them can enjoy their social and academic benefits. They will also be able to list these activities on their resumes, making them more desirable to future employers.
    Provide the resources necessary to help your low income students to succeed. Make sure that all of your students know how to get in contact with librarians, guidance counselors and other non-teachers who are trained to aid students in their educational pursuits. These people can provide students with resources for studying, information on careers, access to scholarships and tools for getting into college.

3. -

How "Not" to Tutor
Low-Income Students

Most people would probably agree that low-income students deserve tutoring. The more pressing question is how do we provide low-income students with the same quality tutoring their wealthier peers can afford?

Historically, low-income elementary and middle schools provide tutoring in two forms: classroom teachers staying after school and local college students volunteering through “homework clubs.”
Compliments of eHow.com (http://www.ehow.com)

Teaching kids social skills pays off in grades
By Liz Goodwin
    A comprehensive analysis of 33 studies finds that teaching kids social and emotional skills leads to an average 11 percentile-point gain in their academic performance over six months compared to students who didn't receive the same instruction.
    That's a big jump, equivalent to a student at the middle of a class's performance curve moving into the top 40 percent of his or her peers, Sarah Sparks at EdWeek notes. The study's authors, led by Joseph Durlak, suggest the dramatic gain could be rooted in the physiology of the brain; social-skill instruction "may affect central executive cognitive functions," he notes—and improvement there helps kids to gain greater control over their impulses and actions.
    The classes emphasize self control, responsible decision-making, and how to form and keep positive relationships with friends and authority figures. One lesson plan from the "Caring School Community" program asks kids to think about "some things you can do if you're not included in a game"—or if you see someone else on the playground who is left out. Many of the programs have an anti-bullying focus.
    The study found the programs help kids form bonds with their teachers and may make students feel more attached to their school—factors that correlate positively with student achievement. Teacher-led programs that encouraged student involvement and role-playing were most successful in these aims, the study found.
    About 60 percent of public schools addressed their students' emotional and mental health with special programming. The study was published in the scientific journal Child Development.