Guest Author: Michael Cerro, Curriculum Science Lead
In the summer of 2011, I started tutoring math and science part-time while I completed my master’s degree. I had been working toward medical school, but I suddenly found myself falling in love with tutoring–especially SAT and ACT preparation. After heavy consideration, I decided to embark on the test prep journey full-time, filling my schedule with more students, eventually reaching a peak of around 30 per week. Given this experience, Private Prep asked me to join their training team and write a guide for the ACT Science section. So, I took the resources we had, gave myself a week to go through them, and developed the first iteration of our ACT Science Strategy Guide. It was raw–and needed a lot of fine-tuning–but it was a start. The following school year, I pushed to tutor even more, and each subsequent year have striven to eclipse the previous one; I knew more experience would be my path to gaining more knowledge, and eventually sharing it.
The more I tutored, the more consistencies I found in the science section. I added to the guide and found better ways to train new tutors. But I still felt I was missing the “glue” to tie all of the strategies together: I wanted to be able to capture the essence of ACT Science in a single sentence. Finally, in the spring of 2013, I found my answer. I had the pleasure of working with a student who was scoring approximately five to six points higher on ACT Science than any other section, which is atypical. During one of our lessons I asked the student why they thought this was the case. The student’s response was, “It’s like the book Where’s Waldo. There is absolute chaos happening on the page, but your main job is just to find Waldo.” “Brilliant!” I thought. I’d finally found my “glue,” and the strategy guide was officially well on its way to becoming a fully fleshed out, published book.
When our students work through For the Love of ACT Science, one of the reasons it resonates with them is that I wrote the book envisioning them sitting in front of me, listening to me speak about the ACT Science section just as I would in a session. This is not the case for your typical test prep book, but it is the case for our books. Students are the ones actually taking the test, therefore we empower our students to take the lead on their test prep process, while we guide them through.
This is our mission with our For the Love Of… series: to speak directly to our students in a friendly, accessible way. When we connect with them on a personal level, it breeds academic confidence and they go into the exams believing they will perform well. This belief in oneself is contagious and can spread to all parts of a student’s world. It’s the secret to guiding students, which is hidden amongst a flurry of dead ends and other distractions within the test prep world. Funnily enough, I guess you could say it’s almost like we just need to find Waldo.
For science!
Michael
