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Journalism of Courage
“Can we take a look at your backpack?” Ana Homayoun repeats that question countless times a day. No, she does not screen airline passengers or work security at a basketball arena. Homayoun is a tutor. She helps teenagers with subjects like math and science, but she particularly specializes in teaching boys how to become more organized.
One afternoon in her cozy office suite in this affluent suburb south of San Francisco, she asked John Ferrari, 14, to go through a 2-inch stack of papers he pulled from his backpack. He sorted through the papers, placing them in separate piles — writing, spelling, vocabulary, tests — to bring order to his loose-leaf binder.
“Oh, here’s my class schedule, what a relief,” said John, an eighth grader. A moment later, he stumbled across something even more valuable. “I have to turn this in tomorrow,” John said. “It’s the name I want on my diploma.”
With girls outperforming boys these days in high school and college, educators have been sparring over whether there is a crisis in the education of boys. Some suggest the need for more single-sex schools, more male role models or new teaching techniques. Others are experimenting with physical changes in classrooms that encourage boys to move around, rather than trying to anchor them to their seats.
But as they debate, high-priced tutors and college counselors have jumped in the fray by charging as much as $100 an hour and up to bring boys to heel. The tutors say their main focus is organizational skills because boys seem generally to have more difficulty getting organized and multitasking than girls do.
And so private counselors in places as diverse as Chicago, New York City, Sarasota and Bennington who guide juniors and seniors in applying in college, have devised elaborate systems — from color-coded, four-month calendars that mark dozens of deadlines to file boxes that students must take to each session.
Goldberg, Homayoun and other private tutors say boys must learn not only how to organize, but also how to manage their time and even how to study.
Robert Gittings, a sixth grader, has been coming weekly to work with Homayoun since September. He, too, is asked to empty his backpack, and on one visit, cheerfully removed a vast collection of textbooks, binders, workbooks, paperback books and hardcover library books.
Most of the binders were orderly and reasonably neat. But there was a stack of papers from science, nearly an inch thick, that needed to be sorted.
“Do you have homework for tonight?” Homayoun asked. He replied, “We have a work sheet.” But it was not in the homework section of the science binder or in his daily planner.
Then Robert remembered where he put it. From a side pocket of his backpack, he pulled a sheet of paper that had been folded into a tiny rectangle.
Homayoun requires her clients to have a three-ring, loose-leaf binder for each academic subject, to divide each binder into five sections — notes, homework, handouts, tests and quizzes, and blank paper — and to use a hole puncher relentlessly, so that every sheet of school-related paper is put into its proper home.
While some girls need help getting organized, at least three-quarters of her students are boys, Homayoun said. Girls usually adopt her methods more quickly.
“Girls pick up on this much faster,” said Homayoun, 28, who has a relaxed but firm manner and a gift for diplomacy with teenagers and their parents. “Boys, you still have to be on them for a while. They’re not going to pick up on it immediately. You have to roll with it.”
