Teen helps 52-Year-old man earn his high school diploma

Carl McGrone dropped out of high school when he was 14. He’s going back after 32 years with the help of a 14-year-old volunteer tutor.

Deciding to obtain a high school equivalency diploma as an adult requires clearing a difficult barrier: the stigma of having never graduated high school as a teenager.

McGrone turned to Schoolhouse.world, an online peer-to-peer tutoring platform designed to give virtual students the free tutoring support they need to accomplish their academic goals.

Schoolhouse.world connected McGrone with several tutors, one being a Bay Area teen named Sachin Syal, to help him prepare for his algebra exam. “When I first became a tutor at Schoolhouse.world, I was expecting to be tutoring kids maybe my age,” Syal says; he didn’t expect his first student to be 52 years old. The surprise went both ways — McGrone was shocked to see a teen on the other side of the Zoom call.

Miles and decades apart, they share a goal: making sure McGrone gets his high school equivalency diploma. Together, they are an example of a new education paradigm, one which may have seemed like science fiction not too long ago, all with the help of Schoolhouse.world.