I could not have been more excited when I signed up to work at the Library's "Tutoring Table" at the beginning of the semester. I had spent almost every Friday morning at that table as a spring-semester Year 1, working hard with a Year 2 peer tutor to try and master some tough Latin texts. Fighting my way through each rhetorical device, I paused only to empower myself by imagining the distant future when I would be able to pass on the knowledge I gained by doing a little tutoring of my own. What I was not prepared for was the tedium of sitting at an empty table, waiting in vain for the arrival of some help-seeking ninth or tenth grader. A few did come at first, but soon the motivation to find help petered out. Where, I wondered, were the people who sought assistance on a regular basis? Did they all go exclusively to their teachers?

An informal poll was enough to give a solid image of the tutoring demographic, and to expose a sad truth about the acquisition of much-needed tutoring, or lack thereof. A poll of twelve teachers, a few from each of the five core disciplines, revealed some pretty low estimates of how tutoring opportunities are utilized. Of the teachers polled, the amount of students each teacher has currently ranged from 60 to 99 students, the average being 82 students per teacher. Of the twelve teachers polled, some said that on an average day, they tutored as few as one student; others said that on an average day they might tutor as many as 12 students. If our teachers would all tutor as many as 12 students a day, and assuming it was a different twelve every day, that would allow the teacher to meet with 60 students a week, still only about 73% of the teacher's total students, provided that the teacher has about the average amount. However, most teachers do not meet with twelve students on an average day, and rarely would that group of twelve consist of all new faces each day of that week.

For the twelve teachers polled, the average number of students a given teacher tutors on a normal day is about 5 students, and out of the average number of students per teacher, that comes to approximately 6% of a teacher's students receiving tutoring. This pathetic percentile might be forgivable if it were a different 6% of the teacher's students each day, but sadly that is not the case. According to those same teachers, on average 3 of the 5 who come for tutoring on a given day will come for tutoring multiple times that week. Thus, on average only 13 different students will come for tutoring on a given week, a meager 16% of the students for a teacher with the average amount of students.

The number of students that these twelve teachers felt actually needed tutoring averaged out to be about 17 students. This number may seem happily close to the actual average number of students who see a given teacher for tutoring, 13, but usually there is little if any overlap between the 13 who do come and the 17 who should. As Ms. Rowen explains, "My experience is that the ones who come for tutoring are the students who are generally doing well otherwise, and doing everything they can to improve their understanding. The students who need to come often don't come."

One of the core reasons that BHSEC is indeed equipped to provide its students with a packed, full two years of post-secondary education is that our teachers make themselves so readily available, as is the fact that we are given the opportunity to receive as much assistance as needed outside of class. Tutoring can often mean the difference between success, not only in passing a class but also in excelling at BHSEC as a whole, and surrender. It seems ironic, therefore, that the intimacy of small group tutoring, which is what makes BHSEC so conducive to all manner of learning and developing, would be necessarily sacrificed if everyone who is entitled to tutoring took advantage of that opportunity. If a teacher tries to tutor all of his or her students in one day, or even in one week, so many questions might have to go unanswered, so many concepts might remain only vaguely illustrated, and one on one attention would certainly not be possible. What dynamic is created, then, if the students who truly need tutoring, by their absence, enable the student who merely desires it? In what way might the system of voluntary tutoring exacerbate the stratification between proactive and passive students? If tutoring only helps people who help themselves, how can we change that to help those who need more help, as we all do sometimes, without overloading our teachers?

Then again, not every student needs tutoring, and managing your time between tutoring and working independently is a valuable skill in and of itself. Perhaps it is best just to celebrate the culture we have created that applauds students who sit for hours on end struggling to solve a math equation or form the perfect thesis.