Practical Advice for Improving Your Child’s Maths - Part 8 - The Tutor Problem

A tutor is not going to help. At least not at first.

…a strange thing for me to say in a blog post on my website for tuition services. However, in all I do, including this blog series and my tuition work, I try to be as open and honest as possible. The goal of this series is to improve your child’s maths and it is simply not necessary to get a tutor, and in some cases can be counterproductive.

If a parent or guardian is fortunate enough to have the spare money available, and their child is struggling in maths, it is common and quite natural to seek out the help of a private tutor. If you have read many of the earlier articles in this series, I talk at length about the goal being to cultivate academic independence. Hiring a tutor may transfer the dependence of the student away from their school teacher, but it doesn’t make them independent. It simply gives them someone else they expect to poke, prod, guide, carry and cajole them to some imagined future success.

In my experience, the most common state of a tutor-student relationship is as follows: The tutor might be good or bad, well-intentioned or money-grabbing, but they have at the very least done enough to convince a parent to pay them weekly. They turn up to the lesson and present some information to the student, maybe the pair work through some questions together. The student might listen or might not. What happens in the lesson is irrelevant because the student will leave the lesson and for the next week will either:

i) Not think about the subject

ii) Do a few minutes’ work on the subject, set by the tutor, with a sense of miserable obligation that is possibly worse than doing nothing.

We start the lesson the following week with the student having forgotten everything that happened in the previous lesson and maybe knowing even less that when it started.

Despite the immense value I have previously described in doing work independently, working with a tutor might even discourage this. The student, who despises maths in all its forms, feels they have done their time for that week. Why should they put in more? In reality, tutoring should be the icing on a cake made primarily of independent work.

The second issue of hiring a tutor for one hour a week is that it presents an apparent, but not real, solution to a student struggling with maths. A genuinely well-meaning parent works hard, makes sacrifices, sets the money aside and hires a tutor. They very reasonably feel that they have tried to help their child, so make the weekly payment and sleep well knowing the problem is taking care of itself. Only it is not, for the reasons I outlined in the previous paragraph. The hiring of a tutor may discourage the level of parental involvement I have advocated earlier in the series.

There are three cases that spring to mind when hiring a tutor is actually useful.

The first is the unrealistic case of the tutor effectively living in-house to oversee and manage the student’s free time, as well as doing some teaching. If the tutor is present to tell the student when to work, how often, the best study practices and when to relax, I do believe that would be effective. With proper enforcement of time management I believe a student can have the same quality of life, the same amount of fun AND see academic progress. This level of intensive tutoring, more akin to a governor/governess role, is not accessible to most families. In fact, this sort of thing is precisely what this blog series is trying to avoid. Note that the tutor responsibilities I have outlined in this paragraph are what I have suggested parents do in my earlier blog posts at a far lower cost of time and money. This series is attempting, through proper intent and cooperation of parent and student, to build the same habits and processes, and see the same results, as an intensive in-house tutor.

The second case of a useful tutor is one who is acutely aware of the need to cultivate independence in the student, and indeed sees it as the primary objective. This is a tutor that knows and can explain that progress comes from the student working independently, with encouragement from the parent, alongside help from the tutor. This is the type of tutor that I aim to be, not always successfully. “Well then,” you may be thinking “I’ll just get one of those tutors.” Sadly it’s not as simple as that.

For one thing, lots of tutors aren’t aware this should be their job. They think their job is the conveyance of information. Of course it is, in part, but a higher order goal should be growing the academic independence of the student. More cynically, a tutor pursuing this goal is effectively trying to put themselves out of a job. One can see how a tutor may be discouraged from taking this approach. Finally, even if a tutor does aim for the same things I do, it is painfully difficult. Each student is unique and the steps needed to get them properly working on their own are unclear. For all these reasons, such a tutor is rare.

The final case is the best and most legitimate application of a tutor. This is the situation where a student is putting in the work independently, and has been doing so consistently over an extended period. They have sincerely undertaken all the steps this series describes and are seeing results. In the case of this properly-oriented student, the use of a tutor can have a dramatic positive effect.

For this ideal student, most of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. They have learned the basic stuff themselves and are tackling the tough topics. A lot of their time may be spent problem-solving, Googling up alternative methods for difficult questions that they haven’t quite understood. Here, a tutor can save a lot time and facilitate some major progress. Rather than googling (a habit I encourage, but is time consuming) the student can direct those same questions at a tutor. The tutor can field those questions instantly, saving the web trawling, then move on to the next issue. The student can bring questions they have attempted and get instant feedback and corrections. I have worked with students like this and the sense of relief and almost-joy at being able to overcome hurdles that, though they could have tackled on their own, are more efficiently handled with the help of a tutor.

Essentially, a tutor is best used for answering a student’s existing questions, rather than teaching from scratch.

I must emphasise that this only works after the student has established the proper pattern of independent work. This type of student is exceedingly rare (in my belief because the existing education system does not develop students in this way) - probably somewhere in the region of around 1% of state school students. Do not kid yourself that your child is part of this 1%, because they are almost certainly not. A good way of testing this is as follows: does the student undertake 2 hours of independent work per week in addition to homework. Do they sit down and do some work on top of what their teacher has set? If they have been doing that consistently for 3 months or more, you should consider getting a tutor.

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As always, if you have specific questions please contact me directly at jake@jakeharristuition.com