With Help From a Friend

In the Upper School Academic Services room, tucked within the hushed library, Macy Cafritz ’23 and LJ Hawkins ’23 are working on verb tenses in Spanish. The conversation is light but diligent, focused but not strained. LJ is writing out irregular verbs and their various conjugations, moving swiftly through example sentences on a small whiteboard. Then he stops for a moment, briefly stumped, but Macy jumps in, giving him a helpful nudge before he continues through the rest of the sentence. 

This moment of support, where LJ looks to Macy for assistance, is the essential essence of the peer tutoring program in the Upper School, which is accessible to any student seeking help with individual questions or specific subjects. Within a session, tutors supply useful study habits and tricks to help peers with difficult subject areas. The tone of a session is reassuring and supportive, reverberating with the message: This subject is hard, and I’ve been discouraged too, but I’m here to help.

“Students often learn better from other students,” explains Helen Markiewicz, who, along with Director of Academic Services Katie Best, oversees the peer tutoring program. “Students are sometimes resistant to asking for help, especially from teachers. They want to be with their peers, and they often listen to their peers much more than they do their teachers.” By setting up this peer tutoring program, students have a space where they’re encouraged to ask for help, with other students in a leadership role willing to guide them through the tricky, often frustrating complexities of a discipline. 

A Spanish tutor, Macy is acutely familiar with the challenges of Spanish 3, a course LJ seeks support in. She’s been through those challenges herself — all the tenses, the subtle distinctions between them — and she’s able to give LJ the same pointers that led to her success. Weekly, they go over sentences; weekly, LJ becomes more confident, more fluent. “It’s helpful to have a person working beside you who has done this before and knows how to solve these problems and communicate those solutions really effectively,” LJ says. “When I’m with a peer, it feels more like I’m talking one-on-one with the person who’s sort of in my position and is still working through it too. Macy gives me the tools that allow me to work problems out.” 

To instruct, to articulate how to solve a problem, is another form of learning. For Macy, becoming a tutor has strengthened her capabilities as a student. She also receives community service hours for her work, something every student needs in order to graduate. “In AP Spanish, we seldom go over grammar anymore because we’re expected to work on other topics,” Macy says. “And we’re still expected to write with fluidity and grammatical accuracy. Tutoring LJ has been a really great way for me to refresh on these small grammatical rules.”

With tutors becoming key facilitators in other students’ success, the program increases individual student agency. The program puts students at the center of academics; they become both students and mentors. One student’s success becomes a mutual ambition. Sentence after sentence on the whiteboard, LJ and Macy practice with the same goal in mind. “It’s really rewarding to channel your focus to help other people succeed,” Macy says. “I think at this point I’m just as invested in LJ’s success as he is.”