EVERYTHING
TEACHING
THE PREMISE
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I ended up on a year-long journey in the world of online K-12 tutoring and became inspired by scrappy, grassroots activism and service.
*The video above also has sound by clicking in the bottom right corner, which "enhances" the experience.
THE STORY
What to Do During COVID?
In the initial days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was inspired by how communities came together for support. Looking for ways to serve, I found an unsuspecting post in a Princeton Facebook group to join in an online tutoring initiative started by Harvard and MIT students called "CovEd," which matched college students with K-12 students for free tutoring during school closures.
COVED's Rapid Growth
I initially helped match mentors to mentees, and it was really exciting working with such an entrepreneurial and agile team. Within a week, over 3000 mentors and 2000 K-12 students had signed up. It still exists today as an independent nonprofit.
I mentored my own seventh-grader in writing, using creative writing exercises to teach him how to analyze for plot structure and how to rigorously check his own grammar.
Princeton Online Tutoring Network
Hearing about my work with CovEd, the Pace Center at Princeton contacted me to help develop their new program, Princeton Online Tutoring Network. I used some of my connections from CovEd to figure out how they were navigating privacy policies for minors, and I also developed POTN's Slack workspace.
Publicolor and NYC Public Schools
Through POTN, I taught two classes, five students each, of under-resourced NYC public middle school students for the non-profit Publicolor.
The strategies I used in CovEd didn't always work with Publicolor students, so I resorted to Kahoots, TikToks, and anime ranking websites to teach them grammar and math.
Refugees, College Access, and Language
After I taught for POTN for the summer, I worked with Rochester Refugee Resettlement Services in their ARSEO program to remotely guide a refugee in high school through the college application process.
I also worked for a summer at NaTakallam, a relatively new company focused on employing refugees to teach remote language classes, when they lacked other employment options.
A New Kind of Teaching: Starting the LIPService
After a year of working with grassroots, responsive tutoring initiatives, I was forever inspired to think scrappy and help out. I thought about applying my teaching skills to my college peers, writing guides on technical skills and the "hidden curriculum." Eventually, this turned into my company, "The LIPService," which you can read about in Everything Instructions.
