This interview is with Michael Wallach, Founder at Central Park Tutors.

 

Michael Wallach, Founder, Central Park Tutors

Michael, can you tell us a bit about yourself and your journey to becoming an expert in education, tutoring, writing, film, and parenting? What sparked your passion for these areas?

I am lucky enough to have been in education for about 30 years now. I fell in love with teaching and writing when I was in 8th grade, and my English teacher opened the world to me through picking engrossing, high-interest novels and letting us really share our experiences with them. So when I was at Cornell, I jumped at the chance to run a writing program for low-income teenagers who had never been exposed to the kind of teaching that let kids express themselves.

Ever since, I have loved the chance to work with kids and write for them. My book “Puzzles for Young Children” was called “one of the best resources for parents and kids I have ever come across” by the website Baby Mozart, and my New York City education company www.centralparktutors.com has been featured in The New York Times.

We have taught over a thousand students, including the children of numerous royal families from around the world, the children of numerous Fortune 500 execs, numerous kids of professors at Columbia and NYU, and families from throughout the city. We love inspiring kids and families, and we have learned a thing or two along the way ourselves!

Your career path is quite diverse! Could you share a pivotal moment or decision that shaped your trajectory into the world of education and tutoring?

I spent many years working at the educational non-profit Seeds of Peace, where we brought teenagers from countries at war together for dialogue. If you can imagine how resistant to doing your homework or chores your child is, imagine how resistant to sitting down and chatting with a teenager whose family has been bombed by the very people sitting across from them!

But we found a way to do it—and after not too long, the teenagers themselves looked forward to those conversations more than anything else that day. What was our secret? We turned those conversations into games! Sometimes we would have the teenagers from each side act out how they experienced the war. Sometimes we would have them draw out their own timelines. Sometimes we had them create their own radio interviews.

And sometimes we established game-like rules that would let them yell at each other all they wanted, as long as they shook hands at the end and agreed to eat with each other afterward. It was an inspiring, incredible process to see these young men and women come to discover that what they really wanted wasn’t to avoid each other; it was to find a way to engage with the people and the world around them.

You’ve worked with countless students as a tutor. Can you recall a specific instance where you witnessed a student’s ‘aha’ moment and how it impacted your approach to teaching?

Sure. I once was asked to work with a student who was highly dyslexic. He was in 7th grade, and he wanted to test into the most competitive magnet school in New York City. After many years of struggling, he had learned to read, but his math had been ignored, and now he wanted to place among the top 2% of all students in New York! What was I to do? We dug in to see what he knew, and I could see he was as nervous and unsure of his task as I was.

Facing the fact that he was going to have to learn about four years of math in six months, I realized I was never going to be able to teach him everything in our tutoring sessions. I needed a way for him to practice, and practice a lot, while I was gone. That was when I discovered online math arcade games.

Every time I saw him, I would teach him a key concept in math, and then I would leave him with a challenge: here is an online math game that uses that concept. Before I see you next week, I want you to beat this game. Every single level… I still remember when I showed up at the second session, and he had beaten his first online math game. He had a huge smile and was so proud of himself. From that moment on, I knew he had a chance. Six months later, that student tested into one of the hardest schools to enter in NYC. He then went on to earn his Master’s Degree in Mathematics from Columbia. Who could turn down teaching after that?

Many parents struggle to find a balance between supporting their children’s education and fostering their creativity. How have you navigated this balance in your own parenting journey, and what advice can you offer to other parents?

This question is very pertinent to my own life as a dad, actually. My eleven-year-old son is a burgeoning musician, and helping him to balance his interest in music and school life has been a high task. But let’s get back to the beginning. He wasn’t always a musician, of course. Nevertheless, we have always valued helping students find things they love to do. So we made sure as young parents to give our son lots of time, oceans of time really, to explore the world. We didn’t even send our son to school!

Instead, we exposed him to art classes, ceramics classes, soccer programs, and music programs. He liked it all, but when he played his first rock show at the age of seven and got off the stage for the first time, he was beaming. He shouted out, “I want to do that again!” Still, he hadn’t quite found his calling. He asked to switch instruments, from keyboard to drums. Sure, we said, even though in our eyes, the keyboard was a better early instrument to play.

Once he smacked those drums for the first time, it was love at first smash. He has never looked back, and he has played more than fifteen shows already. We don’t have to remind him to practice—he loves it. We just have to be on the lookout for things he can’t find—who and where are the best teachers, the best programs, and the opportunities to play. In our eyes, once you allow your kids to find the joy in life—whether it’s through sports, dancing, music, art, or who knows what else—the discipline to develop will come on its own.

As an advocate for incorporating EdTech into learning, what are some creative ways you’ve seen technology bridge the gap between traditional teaching methods and modern learning styles?

A lot of parents are afraid of technology, but the reality is that technology can be a great way for kids to develop in ways they simply couldn’t before the tech came along. Many of our students have learned to love coding and computer science through the MIT-developed game-coding website, Scratch.

Others have learned math or English skills they wouldn’t have practiced had they not been gamified through apps on the web. Some of our students are so in love with Pokémon, all we have to do is place small educational tasks in front of them in exchange for advancements in a Pokémon app, and they can’t get enough of what they’re learning! Our own son spends countless hours on his music software, which allows him to make beats, and then puts those beats up for sale on another website.

Do we care if he makes money? Of course not, but the “game” of making beats and seeing how many listens or sales he gets is thrilling to him, and we are watching a young man learn a whole host of skills—from music to audio engineering to how to survive as a musician in the world—at a young age. In our eyes, tech can bridge gaps a thousand ways. How best to use it comes down to understanding your own kids and learning how many amazing tech opportunities are out there that can inspire kids to develop in ways that enrich their lives.

Let’s talk about film. You mentioned the documentary ‘Left Behind.’  What other films or documentaries have resonated with you as an educator and parent, and why?

Documentaries are such a fun way to learn about life. Right now, we are very into documentaries about music because our son is a young musician, but really, there are so many documentaries out there. I always loved documentaries about advertising for some reason—particularly the director Adam Curtis. His work on the psychology of advertising—and how each of us responds to the core ideas buried in our childhood and the core psychological archetypes identified by the great Swedish psychologist Carl Jung—really fascinates me.

Perhaps my favorite documentary is on a similar topic. It’s a series of interviews with the great writer Joseph Campbell, who wrote about ancient mythology and what it tells us about the human being, and what it means to live a meaningful life. Boy, what an amazing doc! Campbell goes back and forth between telling incredible, gripping stories from the ancient world, of heroes fighting dragons, kids fighting witches, and kings losing kingdoms, and then showing us how those stories can still help us live in our modern world today. Great stuff.

Shifting gears to writing, how has your experience as a writer influenced your approach to teaching and communication, particularly with students?

Actually, I would flip this around. While I have certainly learned things writing that have helped my students, I have learned a lot more from my students that help my writing! And the chief thing I have always learned is: don’t bore them! Kids will let you know if you are boring them, and there really is no greater sin in writing than to bore your reader.

So as I write, I always ask myself: would this be boring to a kid? What could I do to change things up in this scene or this essay? Just the other day I was working on a story about a lemming who thinks for himself. He was learning from the only other lemming out there who had done that – and who had been outcast. It was a great scene for a story, but I realized it was about to get really boring! So, I immediately switched up the scene, had the old lemming throw the young lemming in a jet pack, hit the go button, and see what he learned. Much better, I realized. Much more fun.

You’ve spoken about the importance of parental involvement in education.  Can you share a specific example of how a parent’s active participation made a tangible difference in a student’s learning experience?

No one is more important in a child’s educational journey than their parent. I remember reading a fantastic book with my son every night when he was about six years old. It was a series of stories about Brer Rabbit, written by an African-American journalist in the 1950s in the Deep South. He had scoured the South collecting old fables from former slaves—all children’s stories—and each one of them was fantastic.

But more importantly, he had connected all these stories, and even interrupted them sometimes, with the voice of a narrator. I read an interview with him about why he did that. I am paraphrasing here, but “You see,” he explained, “the most important thing in the old culture wasn’t the story itself; it was the act of telling the story to your child. And I wanted to make sure that role was always a part of the stories.” He didn’t want parents handing the book to their kids. He wanted that voice there, the voice of the dad or the mom, because in history, that voice is the most important voice a child will ever hear.

A great psychologist who studied trauma said that too. As you develop and learn to overcome difficult things in your life, one of the great things you can do is speak to yourself as you imagine a loving parent might speak to you as a child. Those children who had loving parents speak to them that way from the beginning—those are the kids who can grow to become capable, strong, resilient, healthy adults.

Looking back on your career, what’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned about nurturing a love for learning in both children and adults?

I have always felt that learning begins with imagination. Everything flows from that. The greatest quarterbacks in football imagine themselves winning the Super Bowl. The greatest Olympic athletes imagine winning the Olympics. The greatest writers imagine writing the great American novel, or the story that wins the heart of the one they love.

Watching my own son grow up, all it took was the smallest imaginative spark to inspire him to build Legos for hours on end, or the hook of a great story to stay up late and read a whole book in a night. From imagination flows activity, and from activity joy, and from joy flows practice, and from practice discipline, and from discipline, excellence.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Thanks for speaking with me!