Homework hotline: Retired teachers volunteer to help students with math, schoolwork

INDIANAPOLIS – Cathy Frakes is busy walking and housebreaking her two new Schnauzer puppies, but she finds time to get on the phone almost every afternoon, waiting for a child to join her on a call.

She’s one of more than 200 retired Indiana teachers who banded together to help students adjust to at-home learning. K-12 students throughout the state can use the Indiana Retired Teachers Association’s Call & Learn Hotline to get help in most subjects. No internet connection required.

Frakes, 66, taught math at North Clay Middle School in Brazil, Indiana, and lives in Terre Haute. She stumbled upon an email about the Call & Learn Hotline needing volunteers. She’s four years out of the teaching game but answered the call anyway.

“Once you’re a teacher, you’re always a teacher somehow,” she said.

Most of the students she’s tutored needed help with pre-algebra: solving equations, combining like terms, finding the least common denominator. Students read her the problem, she takes notes, then she reads it back to them before getting into the math. Some students forget she can’t see the problems, she said, so they’ll leave out parentheses or exponents. But she’s patient.

“Don’t worry about it, it’s OK,” Frakes tells the students. “I just want to make sure I’m hearing you.”

The first caller was a sixth grader asking for help writing expressions to apply to real-life scenarios. One problem asked for an expression to represent one-third of Emily’s age.

“How do you write one-third?” Frakes asked her.

“One over three,” the student responded.

“OK, now you need a letter. What letter do you want for Emily’s name?” Frakes said.

She chose the letter E and came up with the expression ⅓ e.

This student just needed some encouragement, Frakes said. Others have seemed nervous, mumbling or shuffling to find their papers. She’s heard parents in the background gently saying, “We just did that problem, don’t you remember?”

She sympathizes with parents, many of whom juggle working from home with helping their kids with schoolwork.

“Everyone needs help right now,” Frakes said.

Call & Learn Hotline volunteer Nancy Gavin, 75, heard a baby crying in the background of one student’s call.

Another student told her, “My mom’s not a good teacher.”

The retired elementary school teacher has taught in five states and answers students’ calls from her home in The Villages, Florida. She said she always wanted to be a teacher and feels a strong urge to help kids.

It can be difficult tutoring over the phone without seeing the student’s face, Gavin said, because she can’t get feedback. She keeps her sessions lighthearted. One student mistook his homework problem for “7 x 7 x 7 x 7” instead of “7 + 7 + 7 + 7.” Gavin laughed and said, “Let’s just do both for fun and see what would happen.”

All of her calls were about math, but she hoped to use her background in teaching reading. Thursday, she finally got a call from a first grader who needed help sounding out words. At the end of the call, the student told her, “I’m going to do a few more and let you go, but if I have any problems, I’ll call you right back.”

Sam Gardner, 76, taught science and biology at middle and high schools in Jeffersonville, Indiana, until 2000.

He’s gotten one caller, a student with questions about the relationship between plants and animals and animal classification. Gardner said schools are doing a good job handling remote learning, but he wonders how sustainable it is. How will students who have little to no internet access do their assignments? How will students reliant on school-based food programs get access to meals?

Gavin, the teacher in Florida, helped one student find the area of a combined figure. When they finished, he told her, “I feel proud of myself.” She was proud of him, too.

He asked her if he could go play outside.

“Tell your mom you did a good job,” Gavin told him, “and ask if it’s OK.”