My little bro, Burton and I grew up in a family just like lots of other families here in this town. My parent came here to study and work, they settle down here and they were new to this local community, and they had us, we grow up here just like other kids. But something is different, Burton was born in March which is a pollen season in south of American, so Burton has allergy of most of trees, grass and flowers pollen, he always gets suffering conjunction nose since he was a baby, and this make him super hard to sleep. When he went to school, dude was always wiped during class, and he couldn’t focus for nothing. To helping catch up with his class, my Dad tried helping his homework almost every day after his crazy long working days. But the fact is, English isn’t his first language,  Sometimes, my dad is trying to explain the match problem to him, sounds like cracking some ancient code, so Dad have to think in our kid’s language first, this just like a Morse code converting, rough and slow, not efficiency.

     One day, Burton had a math assignment need some help, Dad didn’t come back home yet, so I stepped up and try to help him to resolve the math assignment, just like a home school teacher ! Very easily and very quickly, Burton understand what I said and he get his math problem done with a high school kid’s help. So, here is the magic that I find out, I talked with Burton’s language just like I was at his age, and explain the knowledge to him, literally, this just like broke the problem down with the language that both of us can get it, we find out this is a good way to go, at end of the semester, his grades actually get good as we can expected !

     This is truly when it hit me.  Our family make this deal and figure out how we can make this thing work smoothly here while parent can be free of their time and focus on their job. So, we work out a way that to make the language gap resolved and make homework helping task from impossible to possible! This is not just our story, I realized that, the story of so many families in our community can start fresh in a new spot. It is a whole different way that we find out to make kids from immigration families to learn with full of fun and make them to be sparked !

      Parents want to help their kids, but they are slammed and may not be able to have all of the school language to talk with kids. That is where BeSparked comes in. We’re a group of volunteer high school students,  we get into this situation because we live it too, and we know to learn as a kid’s thinking. We are not only just tutors, but also friends with younger kids to bridges between the boring book word and the new school word. We help them with homework with the way they actually learn without stress about language gap, we help them crush school so they can feel confident here and explore their learning adventure!  We use what we were experienced before, growing up with them together and help them can do even better !