The secret of success

Eulie Mantock’s reputation precedes her.

The veteran educator is a trusted name for anxious parents looking for their children to score solid results in their high school entrance examinations. For the upcoming academic year, 78 per cent of the students enrolled in Mantock’s Guide – the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) preparation teaching facility she established three decades ago – passed for their first secondary school choice. Ten per cent of students passed for their second choice high school. The news gets even better. Seven students in Mantock’s programme are recipients of PEP government scholarships and, come September, will attend Campion College, one of the island’s top-ranked secondary institutions.

“I like to help mould children to learn and grow. Apart from developing their confidence in themselves to see what they can achieve, what brings me great joy is decades later when they come back to check in with me. I feel so fulfilled in what I have done,” reflected Mantock, who earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees in primary education from The University of the West Indies, Mona campus. While her classroom career began in earnest in Clarendon at Claude McKay High as a pre-trained teacher back in 1976, the young educator subsequently moved to Red Hills All-Age (now Red Hills Primary School) as an intern after completing St Joseph’s Teachers’ College.

Next, Mantock joined the staff of St Richard’s Primary in 1990. It was here that her sharp mind and expertly taught lessons consistently delivered outstanding passes for her student cohort and, too, attracted external attention. “At St Richard’s, my children would do exceptionally well in exams, especially at the Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT), which predated PEP,” a proud Mantock reflected of her impressive 25-year tenure at the Red Hills Road school. “Every year, I could expect between three to eight scholarships from my class. People on the outside looking in wanted to achieve some of that. They would always come in from other schools to ask if they could come to my extra lessons.” The pent-up demand prompted her to begin offering her Mantock-brand of insightful prep classes at a dedicated space beyond her St Richard’s day job in the Valentine’s Gardens neighbourhood. “I established my off-site classes, and even after I retired in 2015, I continued. It grew even further, where sometimes I had to turn back students. Things progressed where I had to have two separate sets of classes,” she explained.

The immensely successful Mantock’s Guide she founded is a family enterprise which involves her adult children, electrical engineer son Clava and statistician daughter Philone. Altogether, the business today has a staff of 10. This includes six teachers supported by administrative personnel as well as content creators. Initially, the educational learning programme functioned with face-to-face classes for the grades five and six students in a classroom setting. It operated within this framework for an extended period until the pandemic five years ago demanded an alternative. “I remember we quickly put something up just for the students from that year,” recalled Clava, a University of the West Indies, St Augustine-educated electrical and computer engineer, who was instrumental in the creation of the platform to ease the disruption of the learning experience for students. Pivoting to engage tweens who had now been relegated to learning from the confines of their homes, Clava, who teaches math classes in the Mantock’s Guide programme and earned a master’s in business administration from the University of New Orleans, said, “The following year we added grade four students and did a full platform and really pushed it to continue the class,” he added. “Obviously, we couldn’t recreate the in-person dynamics, but we still made it close and beneficial in the same way because we definitely wanted to see the same results, and the students are now having the same experience and benefits from the programme.”

Initially starting with rudimentary worksheets delivered online during the COVID-19 pandemic, Clava said Mantock’s Guide – which has children registered online across the span of the island prepping for PEP exams – “evolved into a full student portal where once they log in, they have access to live classes directly”. No second application is necessary, according to him, “as the students can view all their assignments, complete quizzes, and watch recordings and do tests. They have a full type-of-exam scenario”.

With hundreds of eager parents clamouring annually to enrol their children in Mantock’s classes, what does she identify as the secret to her success? To her, the cultivation of critical thinking in the teaching process makes for sharper student minds. “We study the curriculum and see what they want to do and look at test items. For example, when testing one item, you don’t set the question the same way each time. You can have six different ways of testing the same objective with different wording. That’s one of the things I really tap into and use.” Another slice of the Mantock magic is the layered approach taken to tackling the subjects being taught, and the carefully planned execution. “We ensure we cover all the topics across Ability, Mathematics, Language Arts, Social Studies and Science. All of our content is based on the PEP curriculum, so we have trained teachers for our grades 4, 5 and 6 students, and the teachers work together to develop the content,” explained Mantock, who has co-authored three social studies books for grades 4 to 6 in the Macmillan Jamaica Primary Social Studies textbook series. All three are recommended texts by the Ministry of Education. There is, too, an incentivised element to student engagement in the programme. She explained, “When I started out as a classroom teacher, I had different categories like the 90s club, the 80s club and the 70s club.” Mantock would set the pass mark bar at 70, and encourage students to improve on their grade standings to advance to the next club. “So if my students are in the 70s club, they are motivated to go to the 80s. Then as they know they’re near to the 90s, it pushes them to do better,” she rationalised. “That helped the students to know their ability and capability to consciously work for better grades. It also lets the children have a sense of accomplishment, and at each stage of advancement, they are rewarded with tokens or certificates to keep them going.”

With Mantock’s offspring ingrained as part of the operational model of the teaching facility, her daughter Philone is one of the science teachers for registered students. She’s been an active part of her mother’s programme, long before the programme moved online. “When she used to have [face-to-face] extra lessons on weekends. I would be the one to assist the children when they needed help understanding; I would go around to them individually to mark their books. I have been doing this on the weekends with her for maybe 20 years now,” shared Philone, who holds a bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s in natural resource management, both from The University of the West Indies, Mona. “So when we transitioned online, I know my Saturdays are booked; it’s a great experience and something I look forward to because I enjoy interacting with kids, I always have and still do.”

Clava echoed his sibling’s sentiments. A father himself of two young sons presently at the primary school level, he’s gratified by the consistent impact made on Mantock’s Guide students. “They always make me feel proud at this time of the year when the results are out, and we receive feedback. Some of the students I have never met in person, but they will see me when I am out and come up to me to say, ‘Mr Mantock, you really helped me in math’, and that’s when you really feel good,” explained Mantock’s Guide chief executive officer.

As for what’s in the pipeline, the family that teaches together wants to expand even further together. “We want to grow and improve the interactivity for students and make it more rewarding for them. We want to tap into the wider market across the island, the Caribbean and the diaspora,” the matriarch shared of expansion plans. This has already borne fruit as recent prospective high school student registrants originated from as far as St Vincent and Canada. And, while she may have retired in 2015 from St Richard’s, Eulie has maintained close ties with the school. “I used to coach the ‘Junior Schools’ Challenge Quiz’ team there, and I actually went back last year to volunteer as a coach, and we won. I kind of put myself into those situations where it comes to knowledge to keep fresh and going. With teaching, you have to immerse yourself in it,” explained the educator who was honoured with a Red Hills Community Heroes Award at a ceremony last weekend at the Red Hills Baptist Church. Decades later, the case remains the same for Mantock. Delivering solid results will always matter.

lifestyle@gleanerjm.com