 Tutoring Program
The core activity of the Learning Center is its free tutoring program, directed primarily toward high school students.
Many of the Center’s students come from distant villages where educational preparation is limited at best. Similarly, many low-income urban students have to work from an early age, attending school only sporadically. Both need help with their studies, often on a daily basis, to stay in school and realize their dreams.
Tutoring support is almost entirely missing in Oaxaca public schools and universities or in other resource organizations, other than fee-based businesses.
The Learning Center in downtown Oaxaca offers sixty hours of one-on-one or small-class tutoring a week. There are classes mornings, afternoons and evenings, seven days a week. Its satellite center, in the working-class neighborhood of Lomas de San Jacinto, offers four hours of tutoring every afternoon, Monday through Friday.
 Currently six university students receive stipends from the Learning Center to tutor at the downtown location, and there are three tutors and a coordinator on stipend at the Lomas de San Jacinto location. They offer support in:
• Mathematics
• Chemistry
• Physics
• Spanish composition
• Computer literacy
• Typing
• English as a foreign language
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Nancy Feinstein, a long time friend and visitor of The Oaxaca Learning Center, has this to say about the organization:
The possibilities and resources that are generated for the Center’s young people, are always grounded in that respect. When entering the Oaxaca Learning Center, each student can be exactly as he or she is, whatever his/her cultural norms (whether or not s/he ‘fits’ into what many see as ‘appropriate’ school expectations). For example, whether a young person comes one time and then doesn’t return for a few weeks/months, or comes now and then, s/he is greeted with the same warmth, friendliness and welcome, as the experience of those who come to the Center to be tutored every day.
True to its name, The Oaxaca Learning Center has no pretensions of having all the answers. Built into its teaching methods is weekly feedback for the tutors about what is working and what is not.
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