Undergraduate Education, STEM Majors Work as Tutors
Image by Courtesy
03/11/2021
Contacts for media: Christine Gillette, 978-758-4664 or Christine_Gillette@uml.edu and Nancy Cicco, 978-934-4944 or Nancy_Cicco@uml.edu
LOWELL, Mass. – When Luis Pedroso, who emigrated from Portugal as a child, was attending the Lowell Public Schools, he sometimes struggled with math homework.
“When I went home, I didn’t have anybody to help me with anything. I was on my own,” he said. “Math is really a foreign language and unless you understand it, you’re not going to be able to do very well.”
Based on his experience, Pedroso, now president and co-founder of Accutronics Inc., is a supporter of a program that employs UMass Lowell education students who assist in Lowell public schools. The students are undergraduate education majors or STEM majors with a minor through the UTeach program, which prepares students to teach science, technology, math or engineering.
The UMass Lowell students work with Lowell elementary school students as tutors, mentors and classroom support. About 10 UMass Lowell students participate in the program each semester and are paid hourly for their work, according to Field Coordinator Lizzie Casanave.
When the program began in January 2020, the UMass Lowell students worked in different schools across the city. Shut down last March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the program resumed in November, with all of the students assisting virtually at the Lowell STEM Academy, Casanave said.
Senior Payal Patel, an honors biology major from Lowell who is participating in UTeach, is helping third- and fourth-graders with math at the STEM Academy now. She loves the chance to connect with the children.
“Working with the students really does brighten my mood,” she said. “They’re hilarious. It just makes my day.”
Patel assists in a different class each week, meeting in a Zoom breakout room with a small group of students who are struggling with a particular lesson and breaking it down for them, step by step.
She said she’s learning a lot about how to teach online. And, although she plans all of her lessons carefully in advance, she’s discovered the importance of having a back-up plan in case of technical issues or other challenges.
“You can plan a lesson second by second, but when you walk into a classroom or go on Zoom, everything can go wrong and you have to make a whole new lesson on the spot,” Patel said.
Giana Vozella, an education major from Reading, taught twice a week in person at Pawtucketville Memorial Elementary School when the Pedroso Tutors program started a year ago.
She helped kindergarten students with writing for half an hour each day. The rest of her time was devoted to math, working in small groups with advanced second-graders, fourth-grade students who were struggling, and first-graders who were too wiggly at the end of the school day to pay attention.
“I got to work with so many different students and grade levels and learning levels, and with students from so many different cultural backgrounds,” Vozella said.
Vozella is especially proud of helping to figure out the best way to assist two fourth-graders who were trying to catch up to grade level: have them work through problems on a whiteboard, instead of on paper or in their heads.
“It empowered them,” she said. “They actually begged me to give them homework every night.”
Vozella is now working online at the STEM Academy. A first-generation college student, she said she’s grateful to have a job related to her educational goals.
Shailyn Ortiz, an education major from Fitchburg, also tutored in person last winter and is working remotely at the STEM Academy now. While on site at the McAvinnue Elementary School, Ortiz mostly worked one-on-one with kindergarten and first-grade students – the grade levels she wants to teach – on their numbers and letters. She also assisted fourth-graders with reading and writing.
Brianna Yuen, an education major from Grafton, is tutoring a fifth-grade student who has missed a lot of school and needs help catching up. Yuen accompanies her to her math and language arts classes every day, going into a breakout room with her when needed. If that student is out, she tutors someone else one-on-one.
“I’m taking Elementary Math for Teaching right now and it’s cool because I can use what I learn in that class to help the kids in math,” she said.
Declan Burke, an education major from Westwood, recently began helping three fourth-graders in a single class at the STEM Academy. All three children benefit from individual attention in language arts, either because they are English language learners or because they have moderate disabilities.
Burke said that he works closely with the teacher to prepare the three students for new concepts and material before the whole class does a particular lesson.
“The goal is to keep everyone on the same, even playing field,” he said. “I work with the same core three students, but if another student is ill and misses a week or is falling behind on certain topics, the teacher will pull them in.”
He said he loves working with students in such a diverse classroom. He’s especially grateful to get direct teaching experience at a time when undergraduate field experiences are necessarily limited by the pandemic.
“There’s a unit on lesson-planning in every single education class we take,” he said. “Being able to apply that in the real world has been awesome for me.”
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