Hi there. In this education post, I cover the topic of relying too much on tutors. The motivation behind this post is based on my own experiences of me doing math tutoring on the side.
Tutor's Role
The tutor's role can vary between clients and even parents. Different people may want different things when it comes to tutoring and learning. The end goal is to have the tutor help in learning the material and get a good grade in the end of the course.
Tutors can help with:
- Reviewing course material
- Helping out with practice problems
- Analysis of text
- Creating practice problems
- Providing study tips and test taking strategies
- Reviewing past tests and quizzes.
A tutor could be hired for the student to catch up in a course or to maintain good standing in a course. Sometimes tutors are used as a second opinion on things. It is not easy to learn things on your own so a tutor can help offer additional perspectives and ideas.
The Tutor Can't Do It All
A lot of tutoring sessions (in-person or online) are one hour. Some could be 90 minutes. The frequency of tutoring sessions could be once a week or twice a week. It depends on the student schedule and maybe tutoring budget.
A good amount of material can be covered in one hour in theory. As some topics take longer to understand, one hour may not be enough. If the student has a lot of topics to cover then one hour is not a lot.
The worse case scenario is when a student has a test the next day but they have so much stuff to cover in 1 hour. If a course is fast then I can understand this case. If it is a case where the student did not do homework and wants to cram everything in the session, then the tutor can only do so much.
For more technical courses like mathematics, science and computer programming courses, it takes more time to learn things. There are some topics that are really technical and abstract that it takes more than usual to understand them. One hour may not be enough. The student doing homework outside of the sessions does help cut down the number of topics to cover in a tutoring session.
