Member: Ari Freuman

Business: Ivy Tutor

Website: ivytutor.com

Started: 2020

About Ari Freuman

Ari embarked on his test prep career while completing his Master’s degree in Psychology at SUNY New Paltz and further honed his skills through his second Master’s degree in Statistics. Leveraging his deep understanding from graduate-level studies, Ari established himself as a leading private tutor in the New York metropolitan area. Known as the original “Ivy Tutor,” he built a reputation for reliably helping students maximize their scoring potential. Recognizing the need for high-quality tutoring services, Ari founded Ivy Tutor to set a new standard in educational excellence. Ari serves students in person in Hoboken, New Jersey, but he virtually teaches many students worldwide.

How did you become a test prep tutor?

I sometimes joke that nobody chooses tutoring; tutoring chooses them. In graduate school, I had my sights set on what I considered to be a proper career: marketing research. Like most graduate students, I needed side work to make ends meet. Tutoring chooses you by rewarding you handsomely—if you’re good at it. I was good at it. For the first several years, I approached tutoring much the same way a bartender approaches bartending, as a way to bide my time and pay my bills.

What’s more, I enjoyed the lifestyle of being my own boss, setting my own hours, and having ample vacation time, etc. It did not hit me until about year five that this was my career. That was a pivotal point for me because it sharpened my focus considerably. I knew I would need to invest in myself as a brand or a company. I chose the latter. Within a few years, I founded Ivy Tutor, and I haven’t looked back.

How do you incorporate feedback from students to enhance the learning experience?

In tutoring marketing, “personalized,” “bespoke,” “tailored,” etc. are huge buzzwords. The fact is personalization is what makes tutoring effective. At the most superficial level, personalization means you’re teaching students what they need to learn, but it’s a really fun rabbit hole to go down. Before I had all the latest tools to measure cognitive abilities and personality tendencies, I took an intuitive approach by courting my students’ affinity; if you can empathize with all the strangeness associated with being a high schooler —feeling like an adult, that is being subjected to the whims of parents, teachers, and society— your students will feel an affinity toward you.

If you can go further and understand how that intersects with their personality, interests, social life, etc., you’ll be more than a tutor to that student. You’ll be a person they can be themselves with. They will open up, they will engage —and most importantly— they will soak up whatever you say like a sponge. Human connection is powerful like that. Now that we’ve incorporated technology that adds a scientific element to tutoring, I can tailor the specific strategies.

What key factors should students and parents consider when choosing a test prep service?

I’ll focus on test prep tutoring for this one, as this is Ivy Tutor’s service. The tutoring space does not have the equivalent of a bar association or medical board. This is the Wild West. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to suss out the imposters. Ask, ‘What is your tutoring philosophy?’ If you have to cut the tutor off after several minutes of thoughtful and nuanced explanation, you’ve found somebody who is thoughtful and brings a wealth of experience.

Contrary to what most parents assume, test prep is so much more than teaching some tips or tricks. It is broad and multifaceted, spanning so many domains that there is no way to encapsulate a philosophy in a few pithy sentences. The second tip might get me in trouble, but I’ll say it here anyway: avoid tutors too keen on putting the onus on the student for improvements. Tutors who don’t deliver consistent results learn how to cushion their failures early on.

How do you stay updated with the latest educational trends to enhance your tutoring approach?

I’m a voracious consumer of anything that can make me a better tutor. Unfortunately, there is no research area specifically devoted to effective tutoring techniques. However, learning about thinking and memory can be helpful, as they set you on the right track. The National Test Prep Association is perhaps the best single resource for learning how to improve tutoring outcomes. When you put a bunch of smart, collaborative people who all share the same goals in a room, the good ideas will propagate at the expense of the bad ones. This process requires a bit of humility because tutors ultimately need to be honest with themselves. Assumptions we hold near and dear might be wrong, and we must be open to this possibility.

Can you recount a particularly memorable transformation you’ve witnessed in a student’s academic journey?

I can think of many, but I’ll share one of my favorites. I had a student, ‘Steven,’ who didn’t apply himself. His primary interest was sports. Intellectual pursuits did not activate him, but I understood he had a competitive spirit. What students rarely consider, in part because it’s seldom acknowledged in schools, is that normed tests are zero-sum: scores are determined by how students perform relative to one another.

It’s ultimately a competition, and that can be very motivating for students like Steven. I’ll remain agnostic as to whether this is healthy, but Steven didn’t care nearly as much about his score as he did about his percentile rank. For the months we worked together, Steven became a sharper individual. Once reserved for sports, energy and focus became available for test prep. Yes, his scores improved significantly, but the effects were global. His grades shot up, and one of the teachers noted to the parents how amazing this transformation was.

Conclusion: If your tutoring experience were a mystery book, what would the story be?

A mystery about Ari and Ivy Tutor would sell one, maybe two copies. Here goes: I’d be a hard-boiled gumshoe tutor. A “dame,” Scarlett Montana, would sashay into my office—which doesn’t exist because we don’t have a brick-and-mortar location. She’d share her case with me. She tells me her son’s SAT results are inexplicable: “He did poorly, but he gets straight A’s in school. I guess he’s just a poor test taker.”

Initially, I’d be skeptical, suspecting that “little Jimmy” might not be the sharpest tool in the shed. But upon meeting Jimmy, I’d be struck by his boundless curiosity and sharp intellect. I’d get to know him and administer a cognitive assessment. His scores? Off the charts. Nothing would make sense. I’d buckle down with Jimmy, committed to cracking his case. Meanwhile, a subplot would unfurl—a romantic entanglement with Scarlett complicated by her jealous ex-husband.

Along the way, I discovered that Jimmy had learned the alphabet backward and couldn’t read words straight. After re-teaching Jimmy the alphabet, he aced the SAT with the highest recorded score: a perfect 1600. The story would wrap with Scarlett and Jimmy moving to Omaha because that feels just right.

The post NTPA Member Feature: Ari Freuman of Ivy Tutor appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

For those who missed it, in February we discussed How I Wish I’d Taught Maths by British math teacher Craig Barton. The following is a summary of some of the discussion points. Please feel free to add more in the comments!

First of all, most of us did not read the book cover to cover. Some of us began with the best intentions and then ended up skipping to chapters we were interested in…fortunately, the author was ready for that! Each chapter stands alone and references past and future chapters in an effort to keep information compartmentalized.

One of the recurring themes of the whole book was cognitive load. If this is an interest of yours, please come to our July book club conversation around Ashman’s Cognitive Load Theory. Barton stated that teachers can easily overload a student’s ability to process what is going on either through enthusiasm, boredom, or expert-level thinking. We talk too much, introduce too many things, try to create too many connections, or, because WE’RE bored, engage in distracting small talk. We want the experience to be fun for both parties.

The conversation kept returning to the idea of whether learning should be fun. Of course, we agree that learning IS fun, but if a student disagrees what should we do? Is the picture of a baseball player on the parabolic function page of their textbook really changing how they receive the information? If we cannot make the math connect to their “real” life, should we try?

Members made some interesting connections between learning a concept and being coached in a sport. Coaches are not concerned with making practice fun. Athletes do sprints and drills to improve their abilities, and they may hate their coach for it, but they see the benefit. Should math teachers take a page from that playbook, if you will? Barton suggested using small, very regular quizzes and tests. Would seeing their improvement there result in the same gains for students? Acing the test isn’t the same as making the winning goal…or is it? Our next book is Golf is Not a Game of Perfect, so we’ll see if Bob Rotella’s thoughts as a coach make new connections for us as teachers.

We also compared learning to practicing a musical instrument. There are scales and drills there as well, and lots of it would not be considered fun. An enthusiastic student, though, would appreciate being able to hold a note a little longer because they had practiced. These muscle-memory exercises could also be present in math and explain why we as tutors can fly a little faster than most of our students. We see markers and flags that tell us the next step where our students see only words. We train every day, probably enthusiastically, and they don’t. As Barton insisted, “Experts and novices think differently.” A good teacher keeps their humility and remembers what being lost feels like.

We did not crack the code on how best to teach math but we came away with some things to think about. We hope you’ll join us for other NTPA Book Club discussions, held the last Wednesday of every month at 1pm. Our next book is Golf is Not a Game of Perfect (Rotella), to be discussed in March 2023, and Cognitive Load Theory (Ashman) is our July 2023 book.

The post NTPA Book Club – How I Wish I’d Taught Maths by Craig Barton appeared first on National Test Prep Association.

The Staggering Facts on Online Cheating
According to Scott McFarland, CEO of ProctorU, which provides proctoring to test administrators, despite trained proctors watching test-takers and checking their IDs, instances of cheating rose dramatically last year. Before Covid-19 forced millions of students online, his firm’s proctors caught people cheating on less than 1 percent of the 340,000 exams it administered from January through March last year. However, when the number of exams it supervised from April through June jumped to 1.3 million, the “caught cheating” rate rose above 8 percent — an 800% increase, even with trained proctors present. And that led McFarland to remark, “We can only imagine what the rate of inappropriate testing activity is when no one is watching.”

It’s pretty clear that nobody was watching, or the watching was wholly inadequate: as reported in a December 2020 Wall Street Journal article, “One mother in Southern California said that both of her teenage sons, who had never cheated in person, did so recently in remote school.” In that same wsj.com article, Colleen Morris, a high school English teacher, is quoted as saying, “Some parents have told me that their children have had to ‘collaborate’ with friends on assignments and tests because they feel it’s the only way they are learning much this year.”

While much of the information on students cheating deals with college and high school students, the actual problem is far more widespread. The wsj.com article also states that there is evidence that much younger students could also be cheating—or at least getting help from parents. Curriculum Associates, a provider of online curricula and assessments for more than 8 million elementary and middle-school students nationwide, analyzed diagnostic assessment data and found remote students at all grade levels were scoring higher in reading than students in previous years. Some of the age groups also scored higher in math.

“The problem with saying cheating is acceptable here is [that] it becomes an ethical slippery slope, where cheating on one exam may lead to cheating on other exams or in the workplace,” said Steven Mintz, a professor emeritus at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo who writes an ethics blog. “Cheating can become habitual. With kids, you’re trying to develop good habits so they can apply them to later situations in life.”

Take Action Sooner Rather Than Later
We’re all eager to put the last year behind us and perhaps, even if your child did cheat on online tests and assignments, it doesn’t mean they will continue to cheat. After all, it was a year like no other. You can model that “honesty is the best policy” by having a sincere, heart-to-heart with your student to express your concerns and compassion for any stress they might feel. Then educate them about the consequences, which go far beyond reprimands from school officials. Help them see the big picture, which is that if they’re not truly gaining knowledge, their grades will likely fall and they may not have the solid foundation necessary to reflect their true potential on standardized tests. Ultimately, this may make it more difficult to get into a college, rendering the “good grades” garnered from cheating meaningless.

Get Help! 
If you notice that your student is struggling in school this year, don’t wait. They may need a little extra help to catch up so they don’t fall too far behind. Working directly with an instructor or tutor can assist them in addressing any areas of weakness and improving their knowledge and competency so they can perform at their highest level now and in the years ahead.

Jason Robinovitz is the Chief Operating Officer of Score At The Top Learning Centers & Schools, a family owned group of tutoring companies and schools in South Florida. As team leader for a staff of more than 100 educators, Jason is in charge of strategic decision-making, including best practice policies, customer service, staffing, training, marketing, systems, and technology. Jason is a current member of the NTPA Board of Directors as well as an active member of the Independent Educational Consultants Association, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and the Secondary School Admission Test Board.

The post How Last Year’s Schooling Will Impact This Year’s Test Scores and Admissions appeared first on National Test Prep Association.