Significant service from BYU tutors
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Nearly two years after his death, the powerful influence of President Gordon B. Hinckley continues to reverberate on the BYU campus.
In a 1995 devotional at the Marriott Center in Provo, President Hinckley endorsed and advocated the concept of volunteer tutoring.
"Take a little time now and again to reach out to help others," President Hinckley told the students. "You who are extremely able, you who learn with comparative ease, reach down to those who have greater difficulty in mastering academic material that is relatively easy for you. In so doing you will bless your own life as you bless the lives of those you help.
"A little tutoring can do wonders for someone who does not quite comprehend. It will do wonders for you as you give of yourself and your knowledge to bless another."
Today, BYU's volunteer-based Tutoring Services prominently features those very words from President Hinckley on its Web site in an effort to help persuade students to volunteer.
"For those who are at BYU giving unselfishly of their time to help others, what they're doing is consistent with what President Hinckley said in [his 1995 BYU] devotional," said Theodore Okawa, community service coordinator. "It is a blessing to both the tutor as well as the tutee. So those that give are blessed as well as those who receive or are tutored."
With 332 active participants, BYU's tutoring program is unique in both the number of tutors and the fact it runs exclusively off of volunteerism.
"About once a year, I go to a conference and meet with my counterparts from other colleges and universities in charge of tutoring programs. It's quite common that someone will ask how many tutors you have because it lets the person know the size of program you're running. A small college will typically have 20 tutors; a university the size of BYU will have about 80," Brother Okawa said.
"When I say we have 300 tutors, I'm often asked how we can afford that. It's then that I tell them all of our tutors are volunteers, to which they'll commonly respond in a state of shock. 'How do you get 300 busy college students to volunteer to tutor someone else for free?' I don't say it, but in my mind I think, 'What do you expect from a Zion university?' "
In order to qualify as a tutor, a student must have already passed the class for which assistance will be rendered with a grade of B or better, be a native speaker of a foreign language, or have AP or transfer credits in the course. The greatest demand for tutors is in general education, science and math classes. Generally, the time commitment for tutors is one to three hours per week.
"One of the main reasons it's important to me is because it's a difficult role to fill," said tutor Scott Washburn, a senior majoring in physiology and developmental biology. "It's hard to fill that need because the student has to have taken the class or has to have a specialty in that area, and it means a lot to the students who receive the tutoring help."
Scott, who's tutored for more than two years and now works to recruit new tutors, has his sights set on medical school. Most of his tutoring occurs in chemistry and physiology.
"I remember one day I tutored several different people at one time," he said. "It was a fairly busy day as far as the tutoring service. I didn't really feel like I was doing that much, just helping students to see that subject in a new way. But I remember several people coming up to me afterwards and telling me, 'Thank you so much.'
"It's a thing where if you're a tutor and you're tutoring, you don't feel like you're doing something too amazing. But when the person that you're doing it for tells you that you did a really good job, it helps remind you that it is a very meaningful form of service. And that's something that's happened to me several times."
On Oct. 9-10, BYU Tutoring Services held a tutor training conference. Although a 45-minute orientation is all that's required of a student to begin tutoring, the 10-hour training conference permitted students to gain the same Level 1 national certification for tutoring that they would obtain from taking the half-semester tutor training course — Student Development 132.
"BYU's all-volunteer tutoring program provides students with an opportunity to earn blessings and is our way of having students share their gifts and talents with each other," Brother Okawa said. "Some people are good at math but may not be good at language. Others may be very gifted with language skills but not with math. When we share our talents, all are edified. This is consistent with what we are taught in the gospel."
