Jane Radcliffe, M.A, Director
(415) 586-4577

To reach me, send an email to jradcli AT mystudybuddy.org.
When you type it in, be sure to use the @ instead of the word "AT".

S. struggled to get through high school because of a learning-difference. A gifted writer, strongly interested in cars and car-racing, he had a terrible time staying on focus. In high school, each year was worse than the last, with longer assignments, far-off deadlines he found impossible to deal with, and long tests he didn't want to think about. We set up a talk with one of his parents once a month to monitor homework habits. Then we set up a weekly check-point with his homeroom teacher, found out in advance what new concepts were likely to be introduced (especially in math), and made up word-problems centering on cars to teach those concepts. We worked with him to get the school's permission to fulfill his English requirement with a Creative Writing class, then worked with that teacher to get him the flexibility to write to his strongest interests. All the branches of his extended family came together to celebrate his graduation. His dream was to follow that with a well-paying job, and that happened within weeks.

WHY IT WORKED: We built a three-legged stool to support him: twice a week with us, plus a weekly check point with a teacher and a monthly checkpoint with a parent.

B. was a middle-school student who had just survived a major tragedy in her family. She was still able to show up in class, but absolutely couldn't keep focus. What suffered most was math. We met with her once a week, intervened with her family to get her quiet space and time so she wouldn't have to fight for attention to her homework, then found a way to take a playful approach to every math concept she was learning. We used a lot of music, and a lot of games. Pretty soon, she'd giggle in spite of herself, and whatever we'd been trying to teach would fall into place. In the last month of the semester she was named Honor Student of the Month at her school.

WHY IT WORKED: She remembered caring about school and being interested in it. She even remembered that math was kinda fun…

S. was an Asian-American student whose Grade Point Average had been 4.0 since the 9^th grade. He was very computer savvy, very shy, spoke only Chinese at home, and had a vocabulary in English not even 10% of what it should have been. He aspired to following a computer science major at Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, or CalPoly. He was the first in his family to benefit from formal higher-education, and he would have to pull down substantial money. (For the uninitiated: scholarships are widely available, but most of them are around $100. If you need $10-20,000 you're in a whole different game.) We asked his father for permission to enroll him as a library volunteer at the Academy of Sciences, and we made a deal with the librarian there to require him to verbalize every computer-problem he was allowed to solve. We also required him to write a one-page paper every week, and we helped on whatever homework assignments seemed problematical to him. Forced to talk at the Academy, he was able to be more useful with the public as well as with staff. He subsequently applied to Upward Bound two summers in a row and was able to profit both from a wilderness program and a program that let him help out at English Teaching in Thailand over the summer. We coached him on the SATs, and helped him put together a college-admission packet that would show his strengths. He was accepted at UC Davis and is pursuing his dreams.

WHY IT WORKED: This student was highly motivated and highly organized, but had no prior experience of how to present himself as an outstanding candidate. What we did here was packaging.