When Nisha Kashyap greeted her student and noticed he wasn’t responding, she decided it was not the day to talk about schoolwork.
Kashyap, a Los Angeles Mentorship Program tutor, knew her student had been having troubles at home that were reflected in his grades and relationships. As he continued to stare at her, stone-faced, she sat with him silently, waiting for him to fill up the silence. After five minutes, he started talking about his family problems while Kashyap listened attentively.
“While the tutor’s role is to teach the student, sometimes you have to treat them not just as a student but as a human being. … It’s important to understand the need to facilitate their growth,” said Kashyap, a third-year student of religion, geography and environmental studies and director of LAMP.
A typical day as a LAMP tutor starts with a trip by bus to Santa Monica, before a brief walk to the students’ classrooms at University High School, said Stacy Hu, a third-year molecular, cell, and developmental biology student and LAMP tutor.
Since her strength lies in science, Hu tutors students in biology and math and works according to the job the teacher assigns her. This task usually consists of working in small groups of four or five and answering questions the students may have. The tutors may also interact one-on-one with a student recommended by teacher for extra help. The tutors meet with one student about every five minutes, or as long as anyone has a question.
The idea behind LAMP was conceived after a basketball game, said Jon Kang, a fifth-year international development studies student and founder of LAMP. After playing at Sunset Recreation Center, he talked with one of the students placed on his team, who shared his life story.
The student had been in jail for six years but changed his life around with the help of a counselor from his high school. She believed in him and would consistently send letters and money. He was touched by her kindness and later dropped his gang affiliation, attended community college and eventually transferred to UCLA, Kang said.
Kang had been thinking about making the Regents Scholar Society, an organization comprised of and run by Regents scholarship participants at UCLA, become more community-oriented. He thought about the impact a mentorship program could make on high school students. He settled on University High School out of practicality, since transportation was feasible. Its demographics also reflected the type he wanted to reach out to, since many students came from socioeconomically challenged areas and had to be bussed to school.
Kang worked with teachers and counselors and University High School and publicized the program during Regents Scholar meetings and by word of mouth. Since the tutors are college students and have already gone through the college application process, students in the program can relate to them more, Hu said. The program reaches out to students with motivation issues who do not know how they can get to college, she added. The tutors let them know the resources available to them and give them the motivation to go to college.
The classroom can be chaotic, especially since University High School is a public institution and there are many students in each class, Kashyap said. But students are usually excited to receive attention and respect the fact that tutors are taking time out of their day to help them, she added.
She said she has watched students progress through a critical age range and grow “by leaps and bounds.” The tutors help to motivate students by telling about their experience through the college application process and as a student at UCLA. As she presses the students to realize their potential and opportunities, she said she has seen freshmen and sophomores start to shift their focus from the present to the future, beginning to think and even dream. Kashyap added that it has been gratifying to see the joy in the students’ faces when they understand a problem and eventually meet them with their college acceptance letters.
“The most rewarding part is seeing how eager they are to learn and absorb whatever we have to offer,” Kang said. “It does make a difference in both of our lives, just to be able to incorporate that mentoring aspect as well. It’s been eye-opening and humbling to see, if we hadn’t had the opportunities we did, what would have happened to us.”