Our tutor training class each week is one of my favorite times. Yes, I have a lesson plan, but the best comments and insights are the ones they share with each other. An ECON tutor sharing a strategy with a CHEM tutor. All of us coming to terms with patterns of challenge across the disciplines.

We are double that, consistently. And it matters. Tutoring is a great leveler: it's to all of our students, as part of their education, at no charge. Lin et al. (2025) have a recent, readable, open-access overview of how effective it can be for both the learners and the tutors.

For reference, according to InsideHigherEd, the national average for percentage of students using tutoring services is around 13%. www.insidehighered.com/news/student...

Today I made this chart for our Provost. It made me stop and reflect. It shows, in a numerical way, that our peer tutors are exceptional, that faculty support at SMC is genuine, and we are normalizing grounded peer tutoring, despite AI, despite the pandemic, despite isolationism:

Yes, and Cotton’s Library et al.

And this is the previous photo: