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Coaching Kids to Learn

November 28 2007 @ 04:57 PM

Kate Fratti

(Bucks County Courier Times - Friday 7/27/2007)

For all kinds of reasons, veteran educator Kathy Rosso-Gana has just about given up dreaming our current culture ever will embrace year-round-school.  Still, she remains eternally hopeful about year-round "learning."

Kathy is president and founder of the Motivational Educational Training Company and New Hope Academy.  The academy is a non-traditional private day school for kids not thriving in traditional schools.  It was an outgrowth of the training company, a year-round tutoring studio founded in 1972.  Parents impressed by the company's impact on their kids urged Kathy to open a day school.

Kathy, who's in her 50s, has lectured about her teaching model all over the country.  She has a reputation for winning kids' hearts before attempting to fill their brains.

As far as METC goes, the word "studio" is important, Kathy says.  To this day, this isn't a place where kids come to sit in hard chairs in stark surrounding to suffer more math, science, reading or whatever else it is that's causing them trouble during the regular school year.  What point would there be in just more of the same?

Kathy prides herself on a comfortable, nurturing learning environment - water features, soft lighting, pretty furnishings - coupled with teachers trained not just in educating, but in inspiring kids to motivate themselves.  Teachers work one-on-one with a student the entire tutoring session, no exceptions.

Kathy toys with dropping the word tutoring all together.  Words matter, she says.  METC is about coaching kids, mentoring them.

"Kids enjoy learning if you can create the right atmosphere," she says when we talk about this year's Summer Success Camp.  The camp, for kids in grade-school on up to college, offers everything from make-up course credit to leadership training and SAT prep, to reading retreats, a poetry club, even forensic science.

There's computer animation, writing, robotics, movie making, music, digital photography and more.  The cost is resonable for 16 hours of instruction, but Kathy also accepts kids just interested in a day or two.

She doesn't say so, but I think she counts on kids being so engaged they won't limit themselves to just a day.  And if a child enjoys this kind of learning, maybe a little tutoring during the school year and into the summer wouldn't be out of the question either.  (To learn more about summer camps or tutoring or for a free 30-minute consult with Kathy, call 800-300-0003.  There are centers in Yardley and Doylestown.)

Kathy says here reputation "was built from 3p.m. to 9p.m." through METC.  From the start, the studio and its teachers managed to reached kids who'd failed elsewhere.  Staffers say Kathy has a knack with young people, particularly adolescents.  Her thought is that kids don't care what you're teaching until you teach them that you care.  It's especially true of teens, who have keen radar for fakers.

Most kids would rather look bad than look stupid, she says.  A lot of acting out can be tied directly to trouble learning in the classroom.

Enter one-on-one, year-round coaches who don't just teach math, science, english and foreign language, but who mentor kids in strategies for staying organized, setting goals, maneging stress and accepting themselves, all with an eye toward academic excellence.

There are no tutoring contracts.  It's pay as you go.  Again, I think it's because once a child starts seeing some success and parents start smelling some hope, there's no contract needed to keep the kid interested in school, even in the summer.

Kate Fratti, whose column appears on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, hasn't been a kid in a long time, but wouldn't mind a little coaching herself some days.

METC and the New Hope Academy are located at 301 Oxford Valley Road, Makefield Executive Quarters, Bldg. 1701 in Yardley, PA and at 350 S. Main St., Penn's Court, Bldg. 303 in Doylestown, PA