College students offer tutoring assistance to children of families receiving aid from Tzu Chi.
Most people prefer to spend Friday evenings engaged in leisurely activities. After all, it is only natural to want to unwind after a week of school or work. However, some college students at National Cheng Kung University and the National University of Tainan, both in Tainan, southern Taiwan, choose to spend their Friday evenings in a classroom. They are there not to study for their own exams though, but to tutor kids who are from families receiving care from Tzu Chi and who need extra help to keep up with their schoolwork. These college students are members of the Tzu Chi Collegiate Association (TCCA).
The tutoring sessions take place every Friday evening at seven when school is in session. The participating college students gather in a Department of Physics building at Cheng Kung University while older Tzu Chi volunteers pick up over 20 children and deliver them to the university to meet with their tutors and receive instruction for the night.
Besides providing extra tutoring, the college kids visit their students in their homes about once a semester. They conduct these home visits with older Tzu Chi volunteers who provide regular care and assistance to the needy students and their families.
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Weng Xuan-man (center) and two fellow tutors play cards with Xiao-long (in blue vest), a student in a tutoring program, during a visit to his home.
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Tutors visiting
On one such visit not long ago, Tzu Chi volunteer Lai Xiu-luan (賴秀鸞) said to Weng Xuan-man (翁萱蔓), a TCCA member, “Xiao-long [a pseudonym] passed his English test this time!” Weng almost jumped with excitement at this great news.
Weng is a senior in political science at Cheng Kung Univer-sity. She and an electrical engineering student had tutored Xiao-long, an eighth grader, for two semesters, during which time Xiao-long had managed to raise his math test scores from below the passing grade of 60 to a respectable 90. However, it had taken longer for his English to improve. No wonder Weng was overjoyed.
Xiao-long and his father live in an efficiency apartment that Tzu Chi volunteers rent for them. While visiting their home, Weng and two fellow students played a poker game with Xiao-long.
“Did you pass the science test too?” Weng asked the eighth grader.
“I did!” came the reply.
“Nice,” Weng said. She pressed on: “Have you memorized the periodic table?”
While the four were playing, volunteer Lai talked to Xiao-long’s father, A-liang (also a pseudonym), to see how things were going in the family.
A-liang’s family illustrates a typical case of poverty as a result of illness. He suffered a stroke when his wife was pregnant with Xiao-long, which prevented him from working. With the breadwinner of the family down, the wife had to juggle working and caring for the family. She could burn the candle on both ends for only so long, and after a few years she left their home for good. A-liang and Xiao-long ended up having to rely on the help of social services and relatives and friends.
When Xiao-long was in fourth grade, Tzu Chi stepped in to help the family. Besides providing the father and son with aid, volunteers also took the father to volunteer at a recycling station, hoping that the physical work would help improve his condition. The practice paid off, and over time A-liang did become more mobile.
After Xiao-long graduated from elementary school, volunteers arranged for him to attend Tainan Tzu Chi Senior High School, which includes a junior high and an elementary school. The private school sets aside six percent of its admission quota for children from low-income families in Tainan and charges them public school tuitions and fees.
“I hold no grudge against her,” A-liang said to Lai of his ex-wife. “She sends us money even now.”
“It’s worked out the best way possible,” Lai said. “You should thank her for giving you such a great son.”
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Chen Guan-ting (right), a doctoral candidate at Cheng Kung University, talks to college students about their home visits with the children they are tutoring. The college students tutor younger students once a week at Cheng Kung University. |
Back at Cheng Kung
After spending an hour at Xiao-long’s home, Lai, Weng, and other volunteers returned to Cheng Kung University, where they assembled with volunteers who had visited other homes.
Chen Yueh-nan (陳岳男), the advisor for the TCCA chapter at Cheng Kung University, addressed the gathering. He first thanked the Tzu Chi volunteers who regularly and dependably picked up young students and delivered them to Cheng Kung to be tutored. Then he said to the college students that after they had visited their students at their homes and seen what their families were like, they would feel differently when they tutored the youngsters in the future.
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Tutoring sessions like this one have been offered to needy children for six years in Tainan.
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How it all started
The tutoring sessions have been going on for six years now. How did they get started?
Lai explained what brought this project about: “We had a family in our care, the Chens. We had a hard time finding a way to help the family because the mother, perhaps because of her mental condition, was very hard for us to approach. However, she loved her children very much, which gave us an opening to become involved with them.” With the mother’s consent, Lai contacted Chen Guan-ting (陳冠廷), now a doctoral candidate at Cheng Kung, to arrange for some TCCA members at his college to tutor the three children in the Chen family. Volunteers also planned to get Xiao-long, then in grade school, to join the three children.
The Chen family lived in a large residential building, so volunteers secured permission from the management committee there to use the conference room in the building as the classroom for the extra instruction. Just days before the tutoring was set to begin, however, the family decided to move to another place, which nullified all the previous arrangements. Lai thus had to scramble to find another place. Thankfully, the resourceful Chen Yueh-nan quickly found a room on the Cheng Kung campus. The tutoring project was able to proceed at this new site.
Just as they thought that they had solved the problem, the building in which the new site was located was demolished to make room for a new building. The venue for the tutoring sessions therefore had to be changed again. Chen Yueh-nan came to the rescue one more time. He moved the venue to where he worked, the Department of Physics, where it has remained ever since.
More students joined the tutoring program as it evolved, so many that Chen Yueh-nan and the others decided to recruit more teachers for the project. They also decided to make it a weekly event, instead of a monthly one. They settled on every Friday evening because the college kids, with no impending tests the next day, would be more able to make it.
All the people involved with the decision to choose that time were fully aware that it was when most people would rather unwind than teach. What’s more, many students chose to go back to their hometowns on Fridays to spend the weekend. “Despite these drawbacks, I’ve found that participating college students are very dedicated to the program,” Chen Guan-ting said in praise of the tutors. “They always willingly wait to go home until after the tutoring session is over.”
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A tutor (right) plays with a small girl while the latter’s older sibling is being tutored in the same room.
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How are they doing?
Though the tutoring project hasn’t always had smooth sailing, the program has grown greatly in size and is now very much on track, thanks to the combined efforts of everyone involved.
The program’s function has grown beyond that of a mere tutoring project. Lai believes that it is less important for the sessions to raise the participating students’ test scores than for the tutors to have a chance to encourage positive thinking and attitudes in the children. “The college students in the program are role models that the younger kids can look up to and try to emulate,” Lai explained. “They help kindle hope in the younger students that a better future is possible if they apply themselves and stay on the right track.”
Lai also mentioned that because the college kids and their students are closer in age, the younger kids are more likely to confide in their tutors about their issues at school, troubles at home, or whatever worries they might have. The tutors have therefore become good, discreet sources of information who can help Tzu Chi volunteers and social workers detect potential or real troubles in needy families. The volunteers need such information to offer timely assistance to the families.
The college students have thus become a part of the local social support system for needy families. Chen Yueh-nan and his wife, Yen Hsiu-wen (顏秀雯), have been very proud of this accomplishment.
While in college, Chen and Yen were both TCCA members. Now Chen teaches at the Department of Physics at Cheng Kung University, and Yen is the director of academic affairs in the elementary school section of Tainan Tzu Chi High School. The couple’s sturdy support of the participating college students is an essential component of the tutoring program.
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Chen Yueh-nan helps out in a tutoring session.
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Standing behind the college kids
Not all of the students being tutored are angels, at least not at first. One small boy, for example, is like an Angry Bird. He is highly defensive, especially with female tutors. He refuses to accept their care for him, and he uses bad words.
“The boy has complicated emotions and pressures,” Yen said, “and he has the habit of expressing himself through anger.” According to Yen, the boy’s mother left him after her divorce from his father. He missed her, but gradually he became resentful of her, feeling that she had deserted him.
Yen knows it isn’t easy to tutor the boy, so she provides support for the tutors. “I told the boy’s tutors not to feel frustrated,” she said. “I asked them to look at things from the boy’s point of view. His strong emotions are natural given his family’s history.” She advised the tutors to be patient with him if he threw a fit and to try to guide him to express himself in a more positive way. After a couple of times, he might understand that he doesn’t have to be angry to express himself, and he might gradually begin to trust people and feel more secure.
Yen has a master’s degree in special education, and she once led all the TCCA chapters in Taiwan. After the massive September 21 Earthquake that hit central Taiwan in 1999, she led her fellow TCCA members from all over Taiwan to volunteer in schools in the disaster area. They organized courses and group activities to help traumatized schoolchildren and give them back a sense of security. Under Yen’s leadership, the college kids also volunteered at hospitals, nursing homes, and other care institutions. In 2000, Asiaweek picked Yen as one of the outstanding 25-year-old Asian youths featured in their magazine.
With the support and guidance of Yen and Chen, a couple with deep ties to Tzu Chi, the tutoring program has kept a steady course. Like the college student tutors, the couple hopes to help guide young students from needy families towards a brighter future.
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Yen Hsiu-wen helps out in a tutoring session.
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