“What are some ways you can show courage? What are some ways you can show someone your gratitude? Imagine you are feeling sad. What are two things you could do to cheer yourself up?”
Self reflection is one area where the Brown Memorial Tutoring students are showing off their Super Hero abilities. We are starting each session this year with a question of the week, asking students and their tutors to discuss and journal about thought-provoking questions. We are seeing charitable, kind and compassionate writings in this work which simultaneously reinforces our students’ writing, spelling and editing skills.
For example, one student wrote, “One way I can show gratitude is by helping people when they really need it. Another way I can show gratitude is by giving encouragement.”
In response to the question, “Imagine you are feeling sad. What are two things you could do to cheer yourself up?” another student wrote, “When I am sad I take a deep breath and play with my dog.”
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“Close your eyes and listen as far outside as you can. Listen for the birds or a car driving by. Now listen in the building…listen for the children laughing downstairs. Now listen in the room … for the clock ticking. Now listen for your heartbeat … and breathe.”
This might sound like a yoga class, but the students in the Brown Memorial Tutoring Program are starting their sessions with a 5-minute mindfulness exercise, preparing their minds and bodies for concentration and work with their tutors.
Last fall, the Tutoring Program hosted an opening day presenter and trainer from the Holistic Life Foundation, an organization that provides mindfulness workshops and mentoring to more than 14 Baltimore City schools, who shared statistics of increased attention span, fewer fights and outbursts of anger, and a decrease in suspensions in the schools that they serve.
Brown Memorial’s tutors were impressed with the results and willing to implement these techniques during opening group time, before starting their individual sessions with students. This year Tutoring Program staff and tutors are observing a more peaceful beginning to sessions, an increase in focus and a decrease in behavioral issues.
A 5th grader in the program from Mount Royal Elementary School pointed out that practicing mindfulness is important to people. “It can help you calm yourself down from whatever you were doing before.”
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The Brown Memorial Tutoring Program has been a partner with Mt. Royal Elementary/Middle School for decades. During all of those years, volunteer tutors at the program have provided one-on-one tutoring to students from the school who make the two-block walk to the church each week.
That partnership is as strong as ever thanks to Mt. Royal’s energetic principal, Job Grotsky, who has led the school for the past three years. Mr. Grotsky was pleased to find out about the Brown Memorial Tutoring Program when he got the job at Mt. Royal and considers the program an enormous asset to the school.
“Overall it’s just been amazing,” Mr. Grotsky says of the tutoring program. “It’s an extension of our work and a true partnership. We share the same mission for helping our students, and we have the same vision for where we want our students to end up.”
Mr. Grotsky became an educator after nine years of playing sax in a Midwestern-based rock and roll band called Domestic Problems. Eventually, members of the band moved into new careers.
With a mother who was a special education teacher for 42 years and a father who was a state and local school system administrator, Mr. Grotsky gravitated to teaching. After a decade in other Baltimore City schools, he took over at Mt. Royal.
Mt. Royal, like nearly all Baltimore schools, has an extremely high number of students living in low-income families. These students often need extra supports and attention to succeed in school, and the tutoring program helps meet that need. About 50 Mt. Royal students receive tutoring from Brown Memorial, and a large majority show important literacy gains each year. “You can clearly see growth with the students,” Mr. Grotsky says.
But he also appreciates another benefit the program brings to students – a consistent adult presence that allows children to develop a trusting relationship. And the fact that tutors work with the same child for an entire year – and sometimes multiple years – is enormously valuable.
“We always say we want volunteers, but we want the right volunteers,” he says. “With Brown Memorial, you get the right kind of tutors who have the right experience. And our kids just love that nurturing. All of the tutors have that nurturing quality, which is really important.
“The core goal is to bring them up in reading, but that social consistency is a huge benefit,” Mr. Grotsky says. “If you had tutors who turned over it wouldn’t be as successful. There’s the trust factor where kids can open up to tutors.”
Maintaining the partnership with the Brown Memorial Tutoring Program is part of Mr. Grotsky’s commitment to expanding ties with the community around the school.
“As a principal, it’s like a dream come true,” Mr. Grotsky says. “Even if we purchased a program like this, some may not be as successful. It’s a great program, and I’m ecstatic and very humble that we get to be the recipients.”
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Tutoring Program Celebration of Service (browndowntown.org)
In late 2017, the Brown Memorial Tutoring Program lost one of its most faithful supporters, with the death of David Mock. For two decades, David served as a volunteer tutor in the program.
“He inspired a lot of students,” says Martha Socolar, director of the Tutoring Program. “He was a wonderful male role model for students, and they loved him. He was such a knowledgeable, gentle soul who cared so much about the kids.”
David also served for years on the program’s advisory board, offering support and helping coordinate the program’s relationship with the church.
One of the last students David tutored was Tyion Matthews, then a 3rd grader at John Eager Howard Elementary School. Separated in age by more than 80 years, the two developed a warm relationship.
“We used to read books and do some work,” said Tyion (pictured with David Mock). “He used to get my snack and then we’d read Sports Illustrated. I felt excited working with him. He was nice and he taught me a lot.”
“It was a wonderful thing to help educate kids who might not succeed without it,” David once said of his years tutoring. “And I always learned more than they did!”
David is far from the only member of the extended Mock family to get involved in the Tutoring Program. Indeed, an astonishing four generations of the family have offered their talents to help Baltimore City children improve their literacy skills.
Both of his parents—Clark and Margaret Mock—were tutors during the program’s early years after its founding in 1964. They were “absolutely faithful” volunteers, says Sally Robinson, who directed the program for a decade beginning in the mid-1970s.
David’s late wife Virginia, better known as Jinks, also tutored as did his daughter, Melissa Riorda, and grand-niece Olivia Babb. His sister, Lynette Anderson, tutored for years, another sister, Peggy Obrecht, recently began tutoring and Mary Obrecht, Peggy’s daughter-in-law, has tutored and now serves on the program’s Commission (board).
In addition, the Tutoring Program is fortunate to have two Mock endowment funds—one honoring David’s parents and one honoring Jinks—with the proceeds providing some of the support needed to operate the program.
“Our program is deeply grateful to David and the Mock family—for decades of support,” said Martha Socolar. “They have truly made a difference in the lives of many Baltimore children.”
It started with a casual question from a neighbor. “Do you want to go tutor?”
With her own children in school, Jigger Kratz accepted the offer and went to the Brown Memorial Tutoring Program. There she met Tasha, a 1st grader, and they began working together on reading. “Off I went, and I loved it.”
The year was 1984.
Jigger is still at it, never missing a year and once again this fall, she will be serving as a volunteer tutor in the program. Over those three decades, she has tutored more kids than she can count, working with some for a year, others for a couple of years.
The program, which has existed for nearly 60 years, provides one-on-one tutoring in reading, writing and other skills to children from three Baltimore City public schools.
Volunteers like Jigger are the program’s backbone. Each works with one or more children throughout the school year, providing a reliable adult presence in lives that are often unpredictable and difficult.
Jigger has learned how to work well with the kids she tutors. She realized that her first student, Tasha, arrived at the program without having any breakfast. “She was so hungry and couldn’t do any work,” she remembers. Jigger started bringing in a piece of fruit each week.
She recalls the students who had aha moments about the “magic e” (that turns preceding vowels from short to long) or the one whose eyes widened when she explained what math division is – “opposite of multiplication.” Jigger has helped coax shy kids into performing in short plays – after writing their own scripts. And she’s learned that sometimes what her tutee needs most is simply time and space to take a nap.
Jigger has contributed in many ways to the success of the Tutoring Program. She has served on its advisory board and recruited a dozen new tutors, including several from her church, Emmanuel Episcopal.
And each year, she buys a bag full of Santa hats to give one to each kid; at Mother’s Day, she brings in flowering plants and soil to put in mugs for the kids to put together a plant to take home.
“The kids are proud of themselves for what they do for Mother’s Day,” she says.
The Tutoring Program, she says, plays a vital role. “Baltimore has so many problems and there are no easy answers,” Jigger says. “This is something I can do that really has an impact on these children’s lives.”
Aside from the reading instruction, the program provides other key benefits — pride, confidence and satisfaction – key building blocks for any healthy child. “The program’s benefits are subtle in some ways. The testing does not show everything the kids get out of it. It’s been exceedingly rewarding for me as well.”
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