Mathematics is always a scary subject for students and it is especially true for community college students. This article describes some of the ways we can help such a group of students. In particular, the paper identifies some special groups of students and discusses some of the ways a teacher can direct those groups. The author applied these specific methods of helping students for several years and wrote this paper from experience. Typically in a community college, many students work full time, have family responsibility and/or come back to college after several years of “break of study”. This paper is geared towards those students and describes how to direct such groups of students in the correct path. Approaches including watching online videos prior to beginning of the semester, tutoring interventions, study groups, reading selected pages and virtual groups have been shown to be very effective among those particular students. Although the specific subject of mathematics is chosen, the process is applicable in general to many different fields. This is not directly about helping students in particular topics or teaching pedagogy in specific courses but more generally how to direct students to help themselves. Some of the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches are also described in detail.

helping students, community college, higher education, online videos, virtual study groups, study groups, mathematics education.