By Matthew J. Gill/ MGILL@CNC.COM
Thursday, July 7, 2005
Ten signs your child needs help with school work
* Your child’s teacher recommends it at a parent conference or on a progress report.
* Your child’s grades start to fall no matter how hard he/she seems to be working.
* Homework is either incomplete or shows lack of basic skills or understanding even when your child spends the time trying to do it right.
* Your child shows signs of frustration and is ready to give up and is unmotivated for the first time.
* Your child is no longer interested in learning.
* Your child is extremely anxious before any test or quiz.
* Your child complains excessively about going to school.
* The teacher reports that your child is disturbing the class and acting up.
* Your child says, ‘I’m stupid. I’ll never be able to learn this.’
* Your child says, ‘I give up.’ And you say the same thing.
This list was provided by Pinnacle Learning Center.
Pinnacle Learning Center now open in Norwell
Many educators would agree that children are capable of learning in a variety of different ways. They would also likely concur that individual students will struggle with different problems during their educational path, whether in different fields of study or at different levels within those fields.
At Pinnacle Learning Center, a tutoring and test preparation center that opened in Norwell earlier this year, teachers work with students to discern where they’re struggling, and how they can be helped, most often on a one-on-one basis.
“Each person that walks through the door is a different story,” said Steve Shapiro, Pinnacle’s Managing Director. “Every story is slightly different.”
The center opened in March, and in the first few months Shapiro — who has been working in the field of college prep for two decades — said the response has been good. At its location on Route 53, Pinnacle is currently tutoring students who live in 12 towns, including those from as far south as Plymouth and Falmouth. The company’s first location in Canton, handles a student-clientele of 300-400 students in a given year, and is busiest in the month of August.
A large bulk of the students who come to Pinnacle, come for help with test preparation for the SAT Exam, MCAS testing, and other college entrance exams including the ACT.
Pinnacle also offers tutoring for students of all ages, from kindergarten to adult, in a variety of courses including reading and writing, math, sciences such as physics and chemistry, and foreign languages such as Spanish, French and Latin.
When a student comes to Pinnacle for the first time, Shapiro said members of his staff will meet with the student and his/her parents, to work out a goal for the child. They will then come up with a strategy to reach those specific goals.
Shapiro said Pinnacle’s motto is a simple one: “helping people that want a little extra help.”
One common scenario Shapiro said he sees is students who are in grades 4-10, who are generally good students, but they have fallen behind in one particular subject area. That struggle then affects how the student fares in all other subjects, Shapiro said.
In a case like this, Pinnacle staff will ask where the student is struggling the most, and proceed from there. When a tutoring plan has been established, Shapiro said students generally come in for tutoring appointments one or two times each week for 1 to 1-1/2 hours. The length of the tutoring arrangement, however, depends upon each student.
“[It's] as long as it takes to stop struggling,” Shapiro said.
At the end of each tutoring session, the tutor — most of whom are professional teachers who work part-time at Pinnacle — will log specific comments about the session on a staff computer, and these comments will be printed out for parents to view each month.
Pinnacle is located at 320 Washington Street. During the school year, the center opens at 3 p.m., but in the summer — the busiest months for tutoring — the center is open from 9 a.m. – 12 p.m. and from 4-7 p.m. For more information about Pinnacle, call (781) 659-4070 or check out the Web site: www.pinnacle-learning.com.
