Esha Wooten-Brown’s path to starting her own tutoring center actually started when she was a student in a Flint classroom herself, and an influential teacher approached a difficult subject creatively and built her confidence.
“I didn’t really like math in school, it is a really hard subject because it changes every grade and becomes new,” Wooten-Brown said. “But in 12th grade, I had a teacher, Jeff Bean. And he was teaching us, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the first time I understand. Like, I can get math!’ And then when I finally went off to college, I had to break it down for myself and wished I had someone that broke this down for me (in a more understandable way).”
Wooten-Brown was born and raised in Flint and graduated from Flint Southwestern. She joined the military and lived outside the area for seven years, before coming back to her hometown last year and launching Inside Acceleration Tutoring Center. A big part of her inspiration is similar to what she encountered in Bean’s class. Sometimes students aren’t necessarily struggling with a subject, they’re struggling with how it is explained. Simply changing up that strategy of how to convey information can lead to new confidence and success. Everyone learns concepts in different ways, so teaching every student in the exact same way isn’t always effective.
“I had a high schooler this year, and she didn’t understand the ‘alligator mouth’ way that a lot of schools teach greater than and less than,” Wooten-Brown said. “A lot of kids don’t understand what that means, so they’ll just sit there and nod (rather than ask for help).”
Math often requires continually building on core concepts and adding complexity as students get older. But if there is confusion about one of the underlying processes, then it makes it easier to be stuck when the harder concepts come along. Simply explaining the symbols in a different way – as arrows that pointed left for less and right for more – was a simple fix for a student that unlocked her confidence and helped her see other processes more clearly.
In the year that Inside Acceleration has been open, they’ve served around 150 students, providing help for students in 1st-12th grades in math, reading, and writing/ELA. They do work on homework with students in other subject areas, but those three are the main priorities. There’s a link to schedule a free assessment on the center’s website, which allows staff to see where a student is at and what their needs are.
“When we’re able to break things down for kids, because now they know what a diphthong is and they know all these different English rules and things like that, now they’re able to decode big multisyllabic words and they say, ‘Oh my gosh, I can read now,’” Wooten-Brown said. “It’s just about being able to be that person for the kids that I wish I had more of in school, because I’ve always loved school. It wasn’t that I hated school, it was just that I struggled and I needed that help, and everyone seemed to teach the same way – you guys are teaching this, I just heard this, and it’s still not clicking. So I just like to have it click for the kids and see their faces light up and they feel smart.”
Inside Acceleration’s staff, which includes people with backgrounds in education and education environments, sees about 25 students per day for sessions, with a goal of increasing that to 60 students daily. A recent $25,000 grant from the Consumers Energy Foundation will allow them to build more capacity.
They were one of five organizations and the only one in Genesee County to receive funding from a round of Community Impact Awards the foundation recently granted. The Community Impact Awards support programs that create healthier, more vibrant and sustainable communities. Funding will help programs continue and expand their work, reach more individuals and families, and create more opportunities for access to supportive services.
Wooten-Brown said it will allow them to pay more tutors and buy needed supplies for students, like tablets, that assist in their learning. But she’s also happy that it will provide scholarship money to offset costs for families who need the extra help.
“I’m very, very excited about that grant, and proud that we were the only ones in Genesee County that received it,” Wooten-Brown said. “It will allow us to open up our scholarship. We have a scholarship fund that we never get to open because we haven’t had the extra grants or donations for it. Students will receive three months free tutoring, and they’ll be our underserved low-income students, and that’ll be 14 students. So we have a few students that we already serve that will receive it, and then we have a lot of students that have been waiting to get in. Their parents call all the time, and they really need their child in, they just can’t afford it. So I’m very excited to send the emails pretty soon that they have been accepted, they have the scholarship, and they can get their three months of free tutoring.”
Inside Acceleration also sends out free monthly books to Genesee County kids as part of its ‘Pages of Possibility’ program. People interested in receiving them can sign up online. People can also donate to their programs online.
The center also runs a monthly Chess Club on the first Saturday of each month at their facility, located at 3098 N. Center Road in Flint. In an interview with Tia Scott of Flint Beat earlier this year, Wooten-Brown said the club is a social outlet as well as a way to build analytical and communication skills. Part of the tutoring center’s overall goals, in addition to support in school subjects, are to make students more confident communicators who are unafraid to speak up when they don’t understand something.
“At first, they’re very shy,” Wooten-Brown said. “We build their confidence. They’re too afraid to admit that they don’t know something. Once they have that confidence, they start to say, ‘I do not know this. Can you help me?’ And it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, you actually asked for help instead of being quiet and scared.’ Or when they actually get something, sometimes we’ll go out in the middle of the learning floor, and we’ll announce it to all the kids, and we’ll make everyone clap for them, sometimes it’s just really high fives and hugs. It makes us feel really good that we’re actually making a difference. A lot of our younger kids, they’ll bring their NWEA scores back to us like, ‘Look, my score went up so much!’ We’ve helped kids who came here worried they were going to be held back a grade but come here and get to the next grade. We even had a teacher ask for flyers because of how much we turned one of their students around. We’re always so proud and so happy for them.”
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