For the past 21 years and counting, Bob Martin volunteers as a tutor one night a week at Learning Edge (form. Cluster Tutoring).
While Bob runs a textile business with his family, he always liked the idea of tutoring. “I’ve often thought that I might have become a teacher if I knew what I wanted earlier in life,” he recalls. “One day, Cluster Tutoring had a booth set up at Oak Park’s Day in Our Village.” It seemed perfect for what Bob wanted to do.
When Bob started tutoring, there were about 25 tutor-student pairs. Over the years, he has seen the program grow steadily, with more nights added to accommodate the increase in students and volunteers.

Bob started working with his current student, Blake, in 2017, when Blake was in 3rd grade. Now, Blake is an 8th grader who is beginning to prepare for high school. Blake plays basketball and likes to read. “Sometimes we’ll talk about a certain subject and Blake will ask a lot of questions. He is very curious,” Bob explains.
As a tutor, it is Bob’s goal to support Blake with what he wants to do. His main academic goal for Blake is to gain a comfort level with numbers, fractions, and percentages. However, Bob believes the measure of success has more to do with being there and genuinely trying to help.
“I’m happy to have gotten to know Blake. He is such a good person. He’s also been through some difficult family experiences,” Bob adds. “I don’t know if I helped, but I’m glad I could be there.”
The student-tutor pair kept up with tutoring throughout the pandemic, meeting over Zoom. “Some things work almost better on Zoom, but other things were more difficult,” Bob explains. “On Zoom, there were no other distractions. What made it difficult was I never had a good system for how to set up a math problem. In-person, it’s nice to be able to sit there and show things on paper.”
Occasionally, Bob and Blake still opt to meet over Zoom. “When Blake has his basketball games, if it was a few years ago, we may not have been able to stick with it as easily,” says Bob. “It’s good to have Zoom as an option.”
Bob shares that he often wonders if he is making any difference, as he didn’t think he was good at tutoring. “I’ve learned that you can make differences you’re not aware of,” Bob says. “I think it’d be interesting to talk to someone 10 years removed from Cluster about things they may have gotten out of it that they realized years later that stick with them.”
If you are a current or former tutor, student, or parent, and you have a story you’d like to share about the impact of Learning Edge, please send an email [email protected]. We’d love to hear from you!