A Husband and Wife Tutoring Team Takes Off

With the last of their three children out of the nest, John and Donna Devlin, former high school teachers, will turn their attention full-time to tutoring Bronxville students, something that John has been doing part-time since 2008. 

"This past year, I've been teaching during the school year at All Hallows High School in the Bronx, and then after school and weekends, tutoring Bronxville students in math," John said. 

Donna began tutoring a couple of years ago "with an eye to what I would do when my children left home." She provides SAT prep for the critical reading and writing sections. John joined the faculty of All Hallows to teach Pre-Calculus and Algebra II-Trigonometry when his finance job evaporated in 2008, but left this June to devote himself to tutoring.

After meeting at Swarthmore College, the Devlins moved to New Haven to pursue graduate studies at Yale University, John in religious studies and Donna at the divinity school. They stayed on in the area for nearly a decade, teaching at Notre Dame High School in West Haven. 

Their three children all graduated from the Bronxville School. Their youngest daughter, Monica, graduated in June and is heading to Washington and Lee University on a full merit scholarship. Their two older children, John and Maria, also received full merit scholarships, to Emory University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, respectively. Their academic accolades continue to accumulate, with each of the older children achieving Phi Beta Kappa and landing the prestigious Beinecke Scholarship, which provides $34,000 toward graduate studies. John just completed his second year of a three-year master's program in orchestral conducting at the University of Maryland School of Music and recently learned that he was selected assistant conductor of the Capital City Symphony in Washington, D.C.  Maria hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in renaissance studies.

"Bronxville High School did a good job preparing our kids," John said. 

Donna added that the small size of the school allowed their children the opportunity to develop close relationships with the faculty and "those relationships meant so much."

It's their familiarity with the Bronxville School that enhances their tutoring credentials, according to the Devlins.

"We know the Bronxville School program pretty well, and it has many strengths, but I don't find that grammar is a main emphasis," Donna said. "In helping students get ready for those sections of the SAT, I often find a lot of weaknesses in issues of grammar and usage and mechanics and will spend some of the SAT prep time with a grammar text and strengthening their command of their own language, which has many benefits beyond preparing for the SAT."

John says the typical student who comes to him for math tutoring is someone who is "getting poor grades and, when I investigate, it's almost always the case that there are great weaknesses in his foundation. Things that the teacher is assuming that he knows, but he doesn't actually know. So he's getting very little out of the classes because the teacher is just going too fast for him."

John identifies the weaknesses in their foundation and they focus on the fundamentals.

"As time goes by, he's getting more and more out of class and the test scores start going up," John said. "Not because he's cramming for the test, but because he's really becoming better at math. And as he gets better at math, he starts hating it less and, eventually, he will start to like it somewhat."

John uses a series of math textbooks by John Saxon, whose philosophy is similar to his own—each lesson introduces a little bit of new material, while 80 percent is review, thereby strengthening the student's foundation in math. He discovered the textbooks while sitting on a foundation that awards scholarships. Most of the homeschooled applicants, who were much stronger in math, used the Saxon books. It also helps that, several years ago, the recommended New York State math curriculum reverted to the more traditional progression:  Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II-Trigonometry and Pre-Calculus.

The tutoring will also divert them from a sad prospect—neither Devlin is looking forward to becoming an empty nester.

"I loved having young people around and being an at-home mom," Donna said.

John added, "We were going to home school Monica for college. She never even considered it."

And they both laughed.