Posted by Parent, a resident of Another Palo Alto neighborhood, on Aug 25, 2007 at 4:51 pm

You can ask if any of your daughter's classmates have older siblings who might do it. You could also ask at the middle and high schools math departments as they have lists of their students who are willing to do tutoring. My 8th grade son tutored a 6th grade student at school straight after school on recommendations from the two respective teachers. You could also ask your child's teacher for recommendations.

I am not sure about college students, my feeling is that they like to do more than an hour a week and often work for places like Score.

However somewhere like Foothills college may be able to give you the opportunity to advertise in their bulletins.

Posted by clay L., a resident of the Charleston Meadows neighborhood, on Aug 25, 2007 at 5:02 pm

Terrific ideas all, Parent. Thanks. I'll check with the high schools and maybe Foothill and Menlo College.

Posted by Anamika, a resident of the Midtown neighborhood, on Aug 25, 2007 at 8:18 pm

We did the Score program over summer and I have mixed feelings about the program.

Pros -

If the child is focused, willing to take up a challenge the program does help. Exposes children to different levels. Adjusts according to the level - hence the child gets to achieve some 'success' at the end of the session. There is always some staff around the computers and they make an attempt to get to the difficulties. Overall - something worth trying, but I recommend you do a thorough analysis of whether it suits your child.

Cons-

The success of the program depends entirely on the child. If the main challenge is attention span, then what they call as the 'computer' program, IMO is not very effective.

The teachers are willing to help, but sometimes they seemed overwhelmed with the number of children present at the same time. We were trying to get our child adjusted to a certain level and I had requested them not to let the program adjust to the two levels higher. The teacher who talked to me at the beginning assured me that "it could be done". However, I never saw the teacher again - not too sure what happened to the page length notes she wrote down - I found our child getting very frustrated. When I approached the teachers on duty all they had to tell me "the computer decides" and that they had pretty much no control over the level that was thrown out at the child ..I didn't quite buy this thing of "we have no control" .. anyways ..

We didn't try the 1x1 tutoring that they offer - so cannot say much about it. They offer a math only program as well - you may want to check it out and not burden your daughter with the other reading/writing lessoons.

In the end, I think we have more positive out of the program as compared to the negative.

Hope this helps.

Posted by kk, a resident of Menlo Park, on Aug 28, 2007 at 10:18 pm

What about Academic Trainers in Menlo Park? Has anyone used them?