How pretentious: I'm claiming to offer advice to all parties in the tutoring process! But if you bear with me, I hope to actually offer some helpful advice.
Some advice for parents:
It’s easy for a parent to feel guilty. “I have to provide
the best educational experience possible for my child. If I don’t, I’m a bad
parent and a bad person.” Combine that with a lack of clarity about what “best”
is, and it’s not wonder that there’s a lot of insecurity about this.
Unscrupulous tutors take advantage of that.
Do yourself a favor: take a breath, and breathe. You
are not solely responsible for everything regarding your child. You, of course,
have many responsibilities. But your first and most important obligation is to
raise your child in a loving, safe environment. Nowhere is it written in the
contract you signed when you became a parent that you will be held accountable
for how well your child does in precalculus. Remind yourself, explicitly, in
writing or audible speech, that you are a good parent regardless of how well or
poorly your child does in school. I’ve met parents who are terrible who have
straight-A students. (The students are secretly, or not-so-secretly miserable.)
And I've met outstanding parents who have C-students.
For the sake of your sanity, and for the sake of
better results, ease the pressure off yourself. It spills over on the child and
on the tutor, and doesn’t translate into good results.
But if your expectations are reasonable and clearly
stated, hold your child and tutor to them. If the tutor understands your
expectations and can’t deliver, then you need to find someone else.
Some advice to students:
You are approaching adulthood. The hallmark of an
adult versus a child is not age, but the level to which a person accepts
responsibility for his or her actions or inaction. It’s hard and challenging,
and maybe you’ve been conditioned to believe that it’s the teacher’s
responsibility to teach you. That’s bull. You have the most responsibility for
that, because you are the one who will have to deal with the consequences of
not learning. Your teacher will keep on churning out poorly instructed students,
and get a fresh crop next year. But you will live with the results for the rest
of your life. A bad class might not ruin your life, but it is a missed
opportunity. If you miss too many opportunities in life, well, you miss life.
If you need something, ask for it. Your parents and
tutors might say no or be unhelpful. But if you really need something, don’t
give up on it. Be your own advocate. It may not always seem fair, but it will
give you better results than passively accepting what you’re given. “Character
may be manifest in the great moments, but it is built in the small ones.” There’s
no time like the present to build, piece by piece, your character.
Some advice for tutors:
Manage those expectations! Not only is it ethical,
it is good from a self-interest point of view. A parent might not always hear
you when you say that you can’t promise a certain grade in a certain time
frame, but it’s on you to explicitly say that. Do your best, of course. But don’t
overpromise. Although you can get away in the short term with doing that, in
the long run your reputation will be ruined. And it’ll be your own fault.
As you manage their expectations, manage your own. Your
student has been shaped by a decade or two of outside forces. You, as a tutor
and teacher, are a tiny blip on the great narrative of their life. It doesn’t
mean you can’t make a difference – perhaps a life-changing one. But you can’t
expect to force it. As with other relationships, problems arise when you don’t
respect the personhood of the other, and that includes, at some level,
respecting their desire to be idiotic, stubborn, or otherwise foolish for as
long as they like. To borrow terminology from leadership theory, ou may want to
be a transformative tutor, but you might have to settle for being a
transactional one.
And please be organized. You’re a professional, not
some student who straggled in off the street to regale the audience with your
antics and hopefully sprinkle some knowledge. You’ve got a job to do. Do it.
This may seem like a relatively easy job, but if you’re doing it well, it
shouldn’t be. Send updates, be punctual, and be prepared going into a lesson –
not only in terms of subject matter, but in terms of who your student is (in a
substantive sense), and how your student learns.
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