06/24 - Mesa teacher wants to raise an army of tutors

Gene Fazio wants you to join his army.

Instead of toting a weapon and practicing at artillery ranges, though, he wants you to brandish a pen or pencil and invade local schools and libraries.

Fazio, an English instructor at Mesa Community College, aims to create an "army" of tutors by 2010 to provide individualized instruction.

"My goal is to level the academic playing ground between the haves and havenots by providing an alternative path of literacy for those who aren’t performing," he said.

Last fall, about 26 percent of the students taking the English placement test and about 31 percent of the students taking the reading placement test at Mesa Community College tested into developmental English and developmental reading cours es. This means a lot of stu dents aren’t adequately pre pared for academic success when they begin college. To help them, Fazio has developed a writing tutorial that teaches students to write through practice, not by lecturing. He’ll demonstrate the tutorial at a free workshop 9 a.m. to noon Saturday in the Kiva Room of the Kirk Student Center at Mesa Community College.

Parents, educators and anyone looking to volunteer as a tutor at a local school or college can learn how to teach by attending the workshop. The materials can be applied to ninth-grade through college-level learners.

Attendees will get handouts to take home, and any individual or school has permission to make more copies if they wish.

"We’re not in this to make money," Fazio said, "we’re in this to make a difference."

In addition to learning by doing, students get constant oversight. "In a class," he said, "you have to present the information the best you can and hope it sticks."

Fazio likes to draw an analogy to the movie "The Karate Kid," in which a karate master teaches his pupil by having him practice rudimentary moves that are easily mastered — waxing a car, painting a fence, and so on.

Similarly, Fazio asks writing students to put together complex sentences by starting with simple ones. For instance, one of the first exercises is to add two adjectives to a sentence. Taking the example, "The woman screamed," for instance, the student might create, "The tall, thin woman screamed." The work sheets build on these principles quickly to create complex sentences, paragraphs and then essays.

It sounds too easy to be true, but Michael Huard of Mesa is proof that it works. Huard, 32, was a high school dropout who got his GED in

Huard helps other students as well. At the end of his semester in Fazio’s writing course, he became a peer tutor for other students, and continues to work one-on-one with students at ASU.

"You can start to see the progress almost immediately," he said.

Writing tutor workshop

When: 9 a.m. to noon Saturday

Where: Kiva Room of the Kirk Student Center at Mesa Community College, 1833 West Southern Ave.

Cost: Free

Information: Reservations required; e-mail wren@mail.mc.maricopa.edu to reserve or call Gene Fazio at (480) 461-7614 for more information.