David: Volunteerism as civic responsibility
After the 2008 elections, electrical engineer David Fishbaine made the decision to actively volunteer in the community. Our country needs volunteers,” he says, “and fortunately, I have the time.”
That’s when he became a Math tutor for Volunteers of America-Minnesota’s Adult High School Diploma Program, which serves recent immigrant and refugees in Minneapolis. He found the opportunity online and since then, has been tutoring adult learners once a week for three to four hours each evening.
Students in the program individually complete a progression of Math worksheets with the assistance of teachers and volunteer tutors. “The students have a broad range of abilities extending from those who need basic assistance such as adding single digit numbers, to those who are at about a ninth grade Geometry level,” Fishbaine reports. He explains that he discourages the use of calculators. “It’s important for the students to understand how to work through the steps to solve the problems.”
Fishbaine’s tutoring goes beyond simply building students’ Math skills. He helps them learn how to learn. “It’s surprising how much knowledge [some of the immigrant adults] have missed, including techniques for learning,” he says. He illustrates this with a story of an immigrant woman who needed to learn long division, but could not remember the multiplication tables. “She had no idea how to begin memorizing the multiplication tables. Most Americans use a variety of memorization techniques including auditory, visual, mechanical and rhyming methods. With this student, I taught her how to memorize using visual and auditory repetition,” he explains. “Then I told her to sleep on it, which was also a new concept.”
Tutoring adult learners is a rewarding experience for Fishbaine. “It’s the follow-on effect,” he states. “There’s a lot of bang for the buck. I feel that when I help one adult, there’s a good chance I may have indirectly helped a whole family,” he says. “These immigrants are trying hard to pull themselves up.”