Being a Successful Tutor

Video Transcript

"What is being a successful tutor? Ideally, the student has precocious questions about the material that they have learned in class that has aroused their curiosity somehow, and they ask the tutor, "what does it mean when a chemical gets electronically excited"? Whatever, and then the tutor, a knowledgeable tutor has the answer and they can say, "well this is what happens in electronic excitement, blah, blah, blah." So and then well the whole point of that is the student has holes in their knowledge that's like they've painted this picture of what they think goes on except for a few little things that they're not sure about. The tutor fills in the holes. It's a dream to tutor a student like that. This is the perfect tutoring situation because the studor, the studor, the student is looking for just a few specific things that they know how it's going to affect their template, and that's that. Then once they get them, they're just, they've got it and they're getting A's all the way throughout the class. As an example, I had this student, Lauren, who every time I walked in she'd have a list of questions, very specific about what does this do? How does this work? Blah, blah, blah. And I would just answer the questions like that and she'd be like, "oh, okay, so that makes sense when I apply it to this." Like a dream. Anyway, whereas opposed to the other student I had who shall remain nameless. Every time I walked in he's trying to give me a hard time about, "oh, let's listen to some music while we're doing tutoring. Oh, let's, I don't know, watch some t.v. I have my computer on. Do you want to go check this out? Let's check out something. Oh, it's biology related of course". Anyway, the point is the discipline, the lack of discipline is really the dichotomy here. There's extreme lack of discipline, extreme discipline. Who's responsibility is that the tutor or the parent? I say the parent. But if the parent says, "you have permission to discipline my child a little bit by, I don't know, giving them a verbal smack down or whatever", of course at that point, the tutor's got to work with the parent to establish some sort of relationship as far as what they want, how responsible they want to be for the student's discipline. That is the tough part. So what is a successful tutor, it's up to definition. Either it's someone who's helping the precocious student get A's or helping the undisciplined student get C's, that's definitely up to definition. But as far as I'm concerned, if you can get an improvement in grade or maybe an improvement in discipline, teach them some study habits, that's, that's a successful tutoring job."