Jimmy Palmaro can’t read from a textbook or a give a traditional Powerpoint presentation, but it’s clear as day that he can teach.
Palmaro, 57, is an after-school volunteer tutor at the Colony South Brooklyn Houses, a social services nonprofit in that offers social and educational programs to the disadvantaged in Brooklyn, New York. Better known to his students as Mr. P, you can see in the touching video above that even though he’s blind, he’s quite the effective educator.
As Huffington Post reports, in the 1980s Palmaro was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative eye disease that can run in families. Over the next 24 years, he slowly lost his vision, which meant he had to leave his job at the post office. Despite this, he found a new calling as a teacher and for the past 12 years, he’s been tutoring elementary and junior high school children.
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Maybe because he’s blind, Palmaro is extra adept at communicating to his students and getting them to talk through things with him. “My students have to work out the question and verbally express it to me, a process which forces them to familiarize themselves with the problem in a new way,” he told photographer Phyllis B. Dooney, who created the video. “I am an unusually good listener.”
And he’s certainly been an inspiration to his students, many of whom come from disadvantaged backgrounds. “I tell my students, ‘Don’t let your limitations define you. Don’t be shortsighted,'” Palermo told HuffPo. “I’ve gained things through my blindness that are not limitations.”
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At Valley Oaks Elementary School in Houston, Texas, if a student has a negative balance on their lunch accounts, they are given a cold cheese sandwich instead of a warm tray of food. As television affiliate KPRC reports, more than 60 students couldn’t afford to pay the 40 cents a day that would allow them a hot meal. When local tutor and mentor Kenny Thompson learned about the reduced lunch program at his son’s school, he sprung to action.
Thompson, who has worked with Valley Oaks students for 10 years, opened up his own wallet and paid off the $465 needed to zero out the delinquent accounts. “These are elementary school kids. They don’t need to be worried about finances,” he told KPRC. “They need to be worried about what grade they got in spelling.”
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According to the report, Thompson learned that many of these kids would rather go hungry than be seen with their reduced meals. Can you imagine how these kids felt as they ate their meager lunches in front of their better-off classmates? Thompson’s generous gesture ensured that all students at his school were getting the nutrition they need to stay healthy. “When I left the building knowing that they were getting fed, they didn’t have that stress,” he said. “The best money I ever spent.” We couldn’t agree more.
Dan Driscoll started City Football Club, a nonprofit soccer program for middle and high school students in Washington, DC. To play soccer, students had to participate in SAT tutoring and college counseling. Driscoll found that his tutoring techniques helped his students gain an average of 100 points on each of the three sections of the SAT. And while many of his students were heading to college, he wanted to find a way to give the same opportunity to other students. So he started Prepify, a cloud-based service that teaches students to take the SAT and ACT. The program adapts to students’ progress—for example, if a student misses a question, an easier version of a similar question will pop up next—and could close the gap in test scores between low-income students and their affluent peers. Prepify is a for-profit company, and Driscoll plans to reinvest all profits back into the software to create tools like a progress dashboard to connect low-income students with top universities.
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