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The Student News Site of Palo Alto High School

The Paly Voice

The Student News Site of Palo Alto High School

The Paly Voice

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Academic Resource Center makes changes to the tutoring system

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Starting this year, every tutor and tutee pair will recieve a progress folder. After every tutoring session, the tutee will fill out a form describing what they learned during that session to emphasize the material and to make sure he or she is staying on track. – Marc HavlikThe Palo Alto High School Academic Resource Center has implemented new policies to improve the student tutoring system.

Starting this year, every tutor and tutee pair will recieve a progress folder, according to ARC co-ordinator Noel Beitler. After every tutoring session, the tutee will need to fill out a form recording what he or she did during that session, the student’s current grade in the class and, on a scale from one to five, a rating for how helpful the session was.

“My goal is to make the tutors more accountable and to make them really interested in wanting to make their tutees’ grades go up,” Beitler said. “And my goal for the tutees is make them more accountable to getting the help they need to pass their classes. So with those two ideas in mind, this is what I’m going to do.”

Beitler has also come up with a new regulation concerning the tutor and tutee matchups.

“The other thing I really want to discourage is friends tutoring friends,” Beitler said. “This way I will be able to check if a student already has an A and discourage them from being a tutee and suggest maybe that they can actually be a tutor instead of furnishing their A and letting their friends get extra credit. This has been a problem that has come up in the past, so this year I want to attack [this behavior].”

In addition to changes in the tutoring system, the ARC has also added new textbooks. It recieved a $2,500 grant from the Parent Teacher Student Association, which it used to buy extra copies of each book, according to Beitler.

Students are also not required to sign out books borrowed from the ARC. Instead it will be the students’ jobs to care for the books and return them when they are finished.

To reserve books for students who really need them, the ARC is holding extra copies of each textbook that will not be on the shelves, requiring an exchange of a personal item for access to the books.

“This is truly going to your honor library,” Beitler said. “I’m going to trust you this year. I noticed over the past people got clogged up next to the sign up sheet so I got rid of it so students would have an easier way to access. However, I still have an elite library where they still have to give me their car keys, iPods, or phones to make sure that I always have a book for each student. If the books on the bookshelf do disappear I might change my policy.”

With textbooks in greater supply, Beitler hopes that the new system will increase the academic benefits of working in the ARC.

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