Ouachita Stories

My name is Bonnie Magee and I am a junior accounting major from Conway, Arkansas. This is my second year tutoring with the America Counts program and it is one of my favorite ways that I have gotten involved at OBU! This year I have been tutoring a second grade boy  at Central Elementary school three days a week, and he is a bundle of energy that provides me with so many stories. Some days I get there before he has come back from PE and he runs down the hallway waving and smiling so big. I love that he loves to be tutored!

I chose to tutor originally because I wanted to get out of the “bubble.” I had an extremely fun freshman year, but I never invested in the community of Arkadelphia. I love math and am passionate that fostering a love of learning starts at a young age and that passion alone gives a kid so many opportunities in life. When I later heard about the Reads/Counts program during chapel, I knew that was where I needed to be.  I never imagined the relationship that I would develop with the kids I have had the opportunity to tutor! Three days a week I get to walk into his elementary school and show him the love of Christ that he may not see anywhere else. What a privilege it is that I have been blessed with that opportunity!

One of my favorite things about tutoring is getting to see the progress that happens throughout the semester. Typically we work on a lot of addition, subtraction and time. One week we were working on trying to understand the relationship between addition and subtraction. On Monday it was a lot of me asking him to solve an addition problem, and then I would show him the equation rearranged as a subtraction problem. Then on Wednesday we started again at the same thing. But on that day, he would solve the addition problem and then he would stop me before I could ask him another addition problem and show me the equation rearranged as subtraction! Not only did he grasp the concept, he could explain it to me!

Not only have I had the opportunity to see him grow academically, I have had the opportunity to watch him turn into a boy with manners. Please and thank you are now common words he uses, and he loves to help me out and carry my box of materials, which is surprisingly heavy. Tutoring has given me the opportunity to help him grow in confidence, maturity and arithmetic!

Today we took a picture together, and as I was showing it to him he asked if I could print it off for him. I told him yes and here was his response: “Oh good, now I will get to show my mom who Bonnie is. I always tell her about the fun games I play with you, but now she can see who you are.”

An hour and a half a week has made such a bigger impact than I could have ever imagined in both of our lives. I have learned how to love someone who is different than me and on many days very difficult to love, and he has learned to love math and grown into such a sweet kid. 

By Bonnie Magee, junior Accounting major