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Do you tutor math?


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What does that look like?

I’ve been asked to help a young lady with her math, and while I know the math I’m struggling to figure out what help looks like.

I can work the lessons with her, but the program doesn’t offer many problems. So if I work them with her, there aren’t any for her to do on her own. I can write my own and teach from them, but I don’t know what she is working on until she comes to me. (It would take me a minute to look at the lesson, see the problems and come up with my own).
I could work the lessons with her, then create my own and send them home with her (less time as I would have seen all the problems in the lesson.)

Something else? Not worry about it?

Do you assign homework? She is learning multi-step variable equations, but doesn’t seem to have a solid grasp of negatives or how to balance an equation. (What I would do with my kids is pause the multi-step and focus on those two skills first, but that isn’t what mom has asked of me.

Hm. Thoughts? What does tutoring look like for you? Helping someone else’s kid is new to me and I’d appreciate help thinking it through.

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I used to.

 

We would spend the first session playing various games so I could get a good idea of crutches used or problem areas.  Then each session after that, we'd spend half the session on basic skills/skill gaps and the other half on the teacher's work.  One major skill we worked on was identifying clue words in story problems and learning how to talk through the steps.  Once a kid got over that hump, they were able to work on memorization and visualization techniques faster because they weren't struggling with every part of math all at once.

 

This was before I had Right Start, so a lot of my materials were homemade and following Montessori/Math U See techniques, keeping colors and shapes consistent until they were more confident and could branch out to abstract problems.

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I tutor high school math. I work with kids with mental and physical illness (as in institutionalized for 3 months or illnesses like Leukemia) and kids with learning disabilities (dysgraphia, dyslexia, dyscalculia).  Parents pay me to *fix* it, and I have found that helping just with homework does not fix their problems in math. Typically, they are either far behind or just need way more practice than is provided or need things explained in a different way. So I evaluate where their weaknesses are, buy workbooks, and assign homework from me.  If a student wants to catch up, he/she needs to understand that basically they will be doing 2 math classes, the one at school and the one with me.  

 

If I am lucky, I can get a schedule of topics from the teacher.  This is ideal, because I can clean up all the messes in a topic in the month before the topic will be taught in school.  In this way, the student can actually use the time in class (4 hours a week) in a beneficial way because they know what is going on because we had been remediating the prior month.  If I am just helping with homework, then the student is always confused in class, so all those hours are lost.  If I don't have a schedule of topics from the teacher, then I spend 40 minutes of a 1 hour lesson remediating things like fractions (in the workbook I bought and with homework from me), and then 20 minutes helping them with their homework.  This is much less efficient, but you do what you can.  

 

The focus on my tutoring is to get the student to be willing to *try* , to think that they *can*, and to generally believe in themselves.  Also, I work on them recognizing if they understand something, figuring out what they are supposed to be understanding, and then finding a path between the two. This is a skill most students don't know -- they have no idea how close they are to understanding, can't tell you what they should actually be able to do, and have no idea how to fix it.  I teach them this transferable skill as it is so critical to studying and really learning in any stubject.

 

With these techniques, I have been able to get a profoundly dycalculiac student (as in can't subtract 10-8) through a second year statistics class in high school.  I have also gotten a student who was doing 6th grade math at the end of 9th grade and gotten him through Calculus by 12th grade.  I can fix attitude problems in 2 months, and catch most students up in math within a year (sometimes two).  I love teens and I love tutoring.  It has been incredibly rewarding.

 

I'm happy to answer questions, 

 

Ruth in NZ

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I have tutored here and there.  I find it very difficult to tutor behind a live teacher because instead of working on what the student actually needs to work on (which may be several steps removed from the material at hand), there is extreme pressure to get the problems done in the allotted time, which ends up working as you describe, with the student getting too much help on the assigned problems and never doing any on her own.

 

I find it difficult to work behind a video program because I end up having to watch all of the lessons myself to find out what the student was supposed to have learned.  And again, there is the running out of problems issue.

 

My most recent tutoring gig (for Algebra I) started with me tutoring behind Derek Owens (who I love) and rapidly morphed into me doing all the teaching using Lial.

 

All of this is to say that if the student you are tutoring is homeschooled, it will probably work better for you to just teach the course yourself.

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