Feeling perplexed and distraught, failing school is not the lone course of action one can undertake. With the tremulous advent of Peer Tutoring to the swashbuckling Student Success Center, those unable to fathom their sweeping schoolwork can crawl to their fervent peer tutors for assurance of a warm, cosy world.
The dilemma, however, is that, despite the perfect muckle of emails regarding Peer Tutoring pelted at the Barstow institution as a whole, nobody seems to know of it. With tutoring in courses such as Algebra I, Algebra II, Biology, Geometry, Pre-Algebra, Chinese, Spanish, French, and 6th Grade Math meeting at various intervals throughout the week during lunches and flexes and all good and true, people seldom turn to peer tutors for help, choosing instead to place their heads in the crooks of their arms and weep.
As students look askance at any emails flung from the desks of administrators and vice-principals alike, it makes much sense that the contents of another such email would foam from their minds and dribble away.
However, a certain email sent at precisely 3:10 PM on 13 September 2022 altered the world as we know it. To quote, “Beginning tomorrow the peer tutoring program will return for the year.” The email proceeds to list The Cove (or, as more conventional speakers would say, ‘The Library’), and Classrooms 123, 205, 201, 117, 112, 111 and 118, whence the Tutoring is extracted from the Peers on various subjects they happened to have mastered.
This email was striking in the history of email significance for seldom do those overlooked emails proffer information as consequential as this. Alas, ever the overlooked it became while the struggling struggled and the Peer Tutors sat by their lonesome in ever the melancholy gloom.
Generalizing communities, though, never sits too well with those that corroborate individuality, for simply because many go upon certain whims and fancies does not necessarily mean that all do. For instance, Olivia Taffe ‘26, who studied Chinese under the tutelage of Genevieve Hyatt ’23, says, “It helped me a lot.”
Generalizing communities, be that as it may, can, in fact, give an accurate picture of those who conform to their peers. According to Hyatt, who instructs the troubled in French as well as in Chinese, “I have not had anyone come in for French tutoring this year or last year.”
As there tends to be, for most things, a swampy area in between, there is such a middleground in regards to Peer Tutoring. For instance, Charlotte Park ‘23, an algebraic advisor, says, “I have had one person each week come in for tutoring.” As this is neither an excessive throng nor an utter scarcity, it proves a certain diversity of numbers towards those that attend Peer Tutoring, though the smaller numbers prevailing with vigor.
Despite its apparent lack of participants, the Student Success Center (as was the name coined for the tutoring system) was sprouted from shimmering ideals and is an instance of virtue and valiance to counter the arduous school work and the knowledge one claws desperately at on the occasion of confounded bewilderment.
Difficult schoolwork is the key to producing diligent and open-minded intellectuals, but oft appears as strenuous and burdensome to the mind. With the broad variety of courses and extracurriculars one must clank through to accomplish a typical day at The Barstow School, Peer Tutors are excellent in the art of consoling and of untangling the breadth of learning one gathers throughout the day.
Students have acknowledged time, and the various visits and absences that time permits, as a possible reason for their not attending Peer Tutoring, and others have mentioned a certain unblemished pride in which asking for help divulges a certain feebleness of spirit.
Why students leave the wondrous Peer Tutoring to wilt before them as they squint in vain through their clouds of befuddlement to the obfuscated knowledge they seek is as enigmatic as a slug is to a king (although a king is just as enigmatic to a slug, so to all slugs reading this, no brusque connotation was intended).
Although, Peer Tutoring, despite its threadbarren means of scampering about, is as fresh as a button-mouthed toad. ‘Twas merely the year before last, in all honest truth, how, according to Taffe, “they took out the bookstore to make the peer tutoring area.”
Perhaps it is the freshness of Peer Tutoring that causes those in need to forget, or the exhaustion plaguing the memories of the saddening bemused. Whatever the reason, the blatant neglectance of the tutoring is not a direct affront to Peer Tutoring, but rather, a direct affront to the student body as a whole.
