Abby SchenkWhen Michael Bardwell worked for a tutoring company that overcharged uninterested high school students by the hour, he knew he could do better.
The third-year Faculty of Engineering student said his personal experience when he was in high school was “sub-par,” because some of the company tutors would be unprepared, despite getting paid.
It’s one of the reasons why Bardwell is now the Co-Vice-President of Students For Learning High School Chapter (SFL), a university volunteer-based organization that provides free tutoring services to high school students.
Every Thursday from 5 to 8 p.m. Bardwell, fellow Co-Vice-President Cici Du and a team of volunteer tutors book a room in the Edmonton Clinic Health Academy (ECHA) Building to host drop-in tutoring sessions available to students from 24 high schools in Edmonton.
“It started because a few of my friends and I wanted to make an impact on the lives of some of these high school kids,” Bardwell said.
After working for two years as a company tutor, Bardwell said he realized the students were paying approximately $60 per hour for tutoring. What made it worse was that most of the students were disinterested, as they were forced by their parents to take the sessions.
“The students that I was tutoring didn’t really seem to care about it,” Bardwell said. “They didn’t want to be there.”
So, the best solution was to offer a free tutoring resource and a place where “they would come to us,” as this would show their interest in learning, Bardwell said.
Since last summer Bardwell planned and organized the centre, and held their first drop-in session in January.
Bardwell said that the volunteer aspect is the life force of the whole operation, as his favourite part is the three-hour tutoring session.
“In order to become a tutor, we look for their passion and their yearning to be there since we don’t offer money,” Bardwell said.
When the organization first started, there was a strong focus on math and physics tutoring since most of the first crop of volunteers were also engineering students. But the volunteer base has grown since then, and now covers areas including English and biology, with most tutors being qualified to teach more than one subject.
Eventually, he said he would like to see the organization expand into other universities and become widely renowned in Edmonton as an “excellent resource for high school students.
“With around 30,000 students on campus, you are definitely bound to find at least 100 that would be willing to give up their time to enrich some of the lives of these students,” he said.
