Helping with the homework

United Way supported Friends of Simon (FoS) recruits, prepares and assigns university students as literacy tutors in the Lower Mainland.

FoS works with cooperating sites (agencies and schools) to increase school success through after-school, Saturday and summer programs in small group and individualized settings, particularly with newcomer and indigenous K–12 students.

When Simon Fraser University’s (SFU) Friends of Simon project was launched in spring 2006, United Way of the Lower Mainland was involved from the start.

We helped initiate this tutoring project that matches university students to at-risk children, most of them newcomers to Canada or aboriginal children. We brought together potential tutoring site hosts, linked SFU to local child-serving agencies, and developed the funding partnership agreement.

In 2010, FoS served 230 children a week at 14 sites in Burnaby, Surrey and Coquitlam.

The following story was written by SFU student and Friends of Simon tutor, Grant Petersen.

I look around the room… Aha! A boy with nothing to do! I remember him. Last visit, he was wrestling and calling out… and throwing paper rockets.

“So… do you have any homework?” I ask him.

“Nope!” the boy responds.

“Really? None at all? What grade are you in?”

“Five.”

“Aw…” he stares blankly at the table. “Well, yeah… I’ve got homework... I have to trace my hand five times on this piece of paper.”

“Awesome! So let’s get to it then.”

“Can you help me?” he asks.

“I’ll support you,” I say.

“Okay, so you trace it for me then, okay? And I’ll watch.”

“No way!” I laugh. I’m not doing your work for you. You know that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to support you, not help you. Support you in doing it all yourself. ”

“But I suck at it!”

“How about we use this scrap paper for practice?”

“Can I trace your hand first?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say, excited at the prospect of pencil hitting paper for the first time today.

He traces around my hand, biting his lower lip and, at last, completes his squiggly creation. He sits back in his chair; tilts his head away from the paper. He plops his hand down on the paper and traces out five copies of his own hand, not that much smaller than my own. He continues to bite his lip as he adds artistic flourishes to each tracing.

“Hey, that one hand looks like a mummy!” I say to him.

“What’s that?”

“You know those old Egyptian kings?”

“Pharaohs!” a girl shouts from her corner. She’s finished with her grammar work, so she comes to join the fun.

“Pharaohs… ” the girl explains: “They used to wrap them up in long strips of cloth when they died.”

“Hey, you drew this?” the girl asks him.

“Yeah…”

“It’s really good!"

Unable to contain my smile I put the scrap in the recycling bin…

When I get back to the table, the boy looks me with wide eyes and a wider smile as he plops down some papers.

“I got more homework!”

He sifts through loose papers in his folder to find his new worksheet: ‘Antonyms.’

I look at the definition on the worksheet: “An antonym is a word opposite in meaning to another.” I guess I’m learning something too.

“So what does the title say?”

“Antonyms!” says the boy.

“Antonyms…” says the girl, overhearing us: “Doesn’t that just mean opposites?”

“Yes, that’s right,” I say. Maybe she should be tutoring…

“I’ve already finished two of the questions in class!” the boy says with a puffed chest.

“That’s a great start. So, then, what would be the antonym of ‘bright’?’”

He searches through the possible matches: “Ummmm… ‘untrustworthy’?”

“Well… What does ‘bright’ mean?”

“It means when all the lights are on.”

“And what’s it like when all the lights are off?”

“Dark…” He looks at the list of words again: “Dark!”

“There ya go! Nice job. So, what’s the antonym of ‘bright’?”

“It’s ‘dark’ I tell you!”

I laugh again. “Awesome! …Next: What is the antonym of…”

As I read off the questions, the girl peeks over our shoulders again and joins the fun. It becomes a group effort, and in five minutes we finish off the worksheet. This is the most work I’ve ever gotten out of that boy…

The session is over, and everybody is packed-up and ready to go.

“Bye, Grant!”

“See ya next week, Ravi!”