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The Joys of Tutoring
Helping Students Around Educational Detours
By Sandy Fleming
The young boy sits across the
table from me, intent on solving simple subtraction facts. His
tousled hair sticks straight up in spots, and he sticks his
tongue out as he concentrates. Then his face suddenly glows as
an answer comes to him. He remembered a math fact answer
without counting, and that's a real accomplishment.
The students come in all sizes and shapes, but all have one
thing in common. They are not succeeding with learning in
their assigned educational settings. Whether the youngster
missed an excessive amount of school, changed residences
frequently, or is struggling with a learning disability
doesn't really matter. The student needs the specialized help
of a tutor, and I have the privilege and challenge of
providing that help.
My teaching career has taken a less-traveled path. After
spending time as a classroom teacher with mentally disabled
youth, I started my own private tutoring service. I put my
special education training to use and make a difference in
students' lives, one child at a time. It's challenging and
gratifying work, and allows me to see results first hand and
up close.
Students whose families seek private tutorial assistance are
struggling with schoolwork, often for reasons unknown. The
children are failing or nearly failing, and parents are
desperately seeking some help for them. Many times, the kids
are "falling through the cracks" of our educational system.
They don't quite qualify for special education services, but
they can't quite learn in the regular classroom setting. They
may need a slower pace, an extra review of basic concepts, or
even an entirely different teaching method than they are being
offered at school. Sometimes, their teachers have told the
parents that the child is "lazy" or "not working up to his
potential." Many have heard that they shouldn't be so
concerned, since the child will "grow out of it" in the next
year or two.
Teachers, with their student loads often past the numbers that
allow efficient teaching, can not individualize lessons to
help these few struggling students. Some don't even notice
these youngsters sitting quietly in the back of the room with
their consistently low grades. They may not realize that the
good grades that are achieved are the product of countless
hours of supervised homework each and every evening. They
can't know about the sweat and tears that have gone into each
project. "I only assign forty-five minutes of homework each
night," says one teacher. The parent replies that the
forty-five minute assignment took their child four or five
hours to complete. This is passed off as a family problem with
priorities or distraction, and often ignored.
The students who visit me each week generally are not lazy,
unmotivated, or uncaring. In fact, they usually care all too
much, and are suffering from damaged self-esteem in addition
to whatever educational problems they may be facing. Several
years of banging your head against a stone wall will do that
to a person. Peers and even some adults have told the child
that he or she just needs to "try harder." In addition to
diagnosing and remediating educational weaknesses, I spend a
lot of time building confidence for learning. A major review
of previous concepts is often needed, and I can find ways to
disguise what we're doing so that my young student doesn't
realize that we're reviewing material from two, three, or more
years ago. When I find the problem area, we take baby steps as
I reteach the concepts involved. After a few weeks, students
generally begin to see progress and to feel that the tutoring
sessions are, indeed, helping their performance.
The memorable and gratifying moments quickly outshine the
frustrations of working with students in a one-to-one setting.
Such intensive attention, immediate correction and
reinforcement, and individualized remediation has quick and
lasting results for most pupils. A fourth-grade student came
to me with a strong phobia of numbers and things mathematical.
He avoided math whenever he could, grew increasingly
hysterical when faced with an assignment, and was totally
convinced that he was stupid because he couldn't master the
simplest math problems that his friends were breezing through
several years ago. One year later, slow and careful review
combined with multi-sensory teaching techniques paid off, and
the boy had mastered basic math concepts. During the next
year, he caught up to his classmates, and finally, no longer
needed any assistance with math at all. He was able to listen
in class without his brain shutting down and could now learn
productively from the teacher and with his peers.
A third-grade girl had great difficulty with written
expression. She could barely put one or two sentences on paper
before giving up. Words just would not be spelled right,
punctuation concepts escaped her, and sentences did not flow
into paragraphs and stories as teachers expected. Often,
during those first few weeks of tutoring, she would throw her
pencil down in disgust and burst into tears. She responded to
special motivation programs to build written fluency, learned
to enjoy word games, and found a way to get the wonderful
stories in her head to flow onto the paper whenever she
wanted. Her real-life story had the perfect ending when, years
after she finished her tutoring program, I heard that she
graduated high school with honors and was headed to a college
journalism program.
These are the students and the stories that make this job
worthwhile and so rewarding. Yes, there are students who are
less successful, and even a few whose problems run so much
deeper than the educational issues that I cannot find a way to
help them, but the success stories far, far outnumber the
frustrations. I've been doing this long enough in the same
community that I can now look around and see successful young
adults who hold satisfying jobs and know that I helped them
over a rough spot in their schooling and enabled them to get
where they are today.
The boy with the tousled hair who just got the right answer
grins from ear to ear. He's really ten years old, and
age-wise, is much older than the work would indicate. He's
using counting disks to solve most of the problems on the
worksheet, a luxury that his fourth grade teacher simply will
not allow in class. But the manipulation of these concrete
items is helping him to remember those elusive answers. We'll
keep practicing together, and most of all, keep celebrating
these small accomplishments. And who knows, next year at this
time, this boy might be back on track for classroom success,
and there will be yet another child sitting at my table,
learning and growing out of frustration and failure toward
success and self-confidence. I just love saying goodbye to my
students when it means they no longer need my help.
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