Say hello to CSV Tutor Bob Wolf!

When tutoring and working with students, Bob Wolfe, a previous Mack Davis Award winner, says “it helps to be a grandfather…or grandfatherly…” to students. Bob has participated with CSV as a middle-school math tutor since 1996, first assisting at the Tobin school and then later at the Peabody school to help with their intergenerational literacy program.

Bob Wolf, CSV Tutor since 1996.
Bob loves math, and he loves sharing that interest with the students he works with. In the fall of 2006, he worked with a math instructor (“Who was just excellent”) during two periods of the class day, providing aid in the classroom, as well as afterschool.

Through the years of working with students, Bob has found that not all students are the same, nor are all classes. “You can have a group of students who are really great kids as individuals, but as a group, just don’t work,” while on the other hand, another group of kids “who are just wonderful.” Bob pointed out that part of the problem is that students bring their life problems to the classrooms, and schools just don’t have the resources to work with them.

Part of the problem is the difficulty of adjusting to the Cambridge curricula and system, especially since the Cambridge school system is so large. Add to that the middle-school social adjustment; it can only create more problems. But, Bob says that if anything, it has made him more tolerant and perspective about his own granddaughter in middle-school.

Bob enjoys sharing his love of math with students
It has also allowed Bob to reach out to students who are struggling with, “who come into the classroom thinking they will never learn how to calculate the circumference of a circle,” but come away surprised at how much they learn and how fun math can be. He enjoys watching kids learn how to understand concepts through doing them, rather than through rote memorization.

Bob admits his own love of math comes from a teacher he had in seventh or eighth grade. Math has always been like unraveling a puzzle, and Bob works with students to reveal the same fun qualities in math that they hadn’t realized before.