Juniors volunteer at East Palo Alto YMCA

Junior Annie Xu placed a pencil inside a glass of water, and with a middle school student, observed how the water’s surface appeared to slice the pencil in two.

This was Xu’s hands-on approach for explaining refraction, the phenomenon in which light or other waves bend when passing through a medium of different density.

In hopes of providing kids from an underprivileged area with an extra resource, Xu and junior Julia Deng have founded a tutoring program in partnership with East Palo Alto YMCA.

Starting Sept. 5, Xu, Deng and other volunteer tutors are spending around an hour and a half once a week helping these middle school students with homework.

The pair decided to create this program after a school trip to Mexico.

“After we came back, we realized it would be nice to connect with a Hispanic community that lives near us and use that opportunity to practice our Spanish,” Xu said.

Because many East Palo Alto families do not speak English and cannot afford tutors or classes for their children, parents can have a hard time helping their kids with homework.

The chance to reach out and offer academic help fueled their desire to create the program.

“Tutoring these kids is important to us because we want to help those who did not necessarily have access to all the opportunities that we had,” Deng said. “There are kids out there who don’t have access to paid tutoring but want the extra help. And we are able to provide it free, so it feels right that we should.”

Math teacher P.J. Yim recommended they volunteer in East Palo Alto to them because of the area’s large Hispanic population.

But because the commute to East Palo Alto can be long, Deng said it was difficult to recruit tutors for the first meeting. Moreover,  the meeting was right after Labor Day and word about the event was not spread quickly enough, so their first session fell short of expectations — only two students came. In the future, they expect more students will join.

On the other hand, there were many highlights in tutoring the students. Both kids were extremely bright, Deng said, and the tutors enjoyed interacting with them.

Leena Elzeiny, a junior who now attends Middle College and is volunteering with their program, was surprised by the students’ similarity with her.

“My initial assumption was ignorant because I walked in with the expectation that these students would need a lot of help. But after only one exchange, I quickly came to realize that these students were actually just like us in middle school,” she said.

Initially, they had planned to focus on math, but they decided to open their tutoring help to any subject.

When it comes to practicing Spanish, they plan on having short conversations with the kids, although according to Xu, the kids are “very much fluent with English and don’t need our Spanish abilities.” As a result, they plan on postponing Spanish conversations until after they have built closer relationships with the students.

“We were thinking that if we bring our own Spanish homework, they can help us with Spanish as we help them with science and math,” Deng said. “But we don’t want to do that yet — we want to get to know them more first.”

Another goal is to converse with the parents when they come in and drop off their kids, so that they can know what their kid is learning and how they have been doing in school, Xu said. Because some parents do not speak English, they may not understand all of the homework their kids are doing.

Xu hopes she and other tutors will help the kids recognize that with patience and a little bit of help, they can learn any subject, no matter how difficult it may seem at first.

Xu said, “Together with other initiatives, hopefully we can propel students in East Palo Alto forward.”