Richard 's Tutoring Blog

Going back to tutoring after not having done it for a few years required quite a bit of preparation before I started tutoring again. I thought it might be helpful especially to people just starting out as tutors to describe the 3 steps I took to prepare myself for my latest tutoring job. All the steps were equally important, so I'll just list them in the order in which I did them.

The first thing I did to prepare for the tutoring job was to carefully plot out the route to their house. I used Google Maps to find the route options from my house to their house, and found the easiest route. Finding...

As I explained in my blog entry "Teaching Science Without Any Scientific Equipment" how science can be taught without any costly equipment, spending a lot of money on equipment is completely unnecessary for high-quality learning. (A good teacher is more important than any learning equipment could ever be.) That applies to other subjects too, not just science. The cheapest odds and ends, used properly, are just as effective for teaching as anything you could purchase at any price.

One of the most valuable pieces of educational equipment I have ever found is the simple index card or flashcard...

One of the strangest tutoring jobs I ever had was for a family of radical unschoolers.

Unschooling is like homeschooling, but without a traditional curriculum. To some extent, I agree with unschoolers, in their desire to concentrate on the interests and abilities of the students, and in removing any artificial application of elements of classroom learning, like busywork or homework. But I disagree with extreme unschooling in that I think it's sometimes necessary, unfortunately, for kids to have to learn things that are important but that they may not enjoy.

I think most unschoolers are more...

I once had a chemistry teacher who sometimes used to run around to teach scientific concepts, such as acting out the part of electrons to demonstrate different kinds of chemical bonding. I think I actually learned more from his little skits than from doing experiments with actual chemicals! When you do experiments with chemicals, you can see the results of the chemical processes, but not the chemical process itself.

Using actual scientific equipment is a better way of learning how to use the equipment, but for learning concepts, I think skits and models are much more effective.

This is good...

Most of the professors I had at West Chester University were not as bad as the one I mentioned in the last Blog post. One of the best ones I had was for Educational Psychology. He was a Thomistic philosopher.

One of the main themes of his course is something that I always incorporate into my teaching. It's simply that the amount of learning that goes on is in direct proportion to the amount of thinking that the learner puts into it.

It seems obvious: the more a student is paying attention, the more he will learn.

But there is a bit more to it than that. Even if a student is listening to every...

I did get one terrible piece of advice, but it turned out to be very useful, when I tried doing the complete opposite.

It was a professor I had at West Chester University while I was getting my education degree who gave me that outstandingly bad advice. (I had many professors at WCU who were truly excellent. This one was not.)

I was working in a summer reading program with little kids. One of the first-grade children I was teaching there had been diagnosed as being hyperactive. This was my first experience with that, and I was not sure how to handle it. So I asked her how I should handle this...

Another piece of advice that I got for dealing with bad children I think helps more with older children.

I had a friend who was a high school English teacher, who was teaching in a juvenile detention center. She was dealing with children who were criminals, so those youngsters were pretty bad. The way she said she dealt with it was to be friendly toward the worst kids. When a teenager has gone all through school being hated by every teacher they ever had, and they finally have a teacher who likes them instead of hating them, it's quite a shock! And then they'll do everything they can to help...

Almost all the children I have worked with have been great: hard-working, obedient, polite. But there have been a few times when I’ve had to deal with children who were, shall we say, a bit more of a challenge. I've gotten some good advice for dealing with bad kids, which I thought I'd share here. A couple of pieces of advice were very good. One was terrible advice, but turned out to be just as useful in its own way! I'm just going to describe the first piece of advice for now.

Once when I was just starting out as a teacher, I had to deal with a totally undisciplined child who was Kindergarten-age...

Sometimes adults can grow impatient with children, when they seem unwilling to concentrate on a task as long as adults seem to be able to. But in fact, there may be no problem at all with the child, because they actually are spending just as much time on tasks as adults are able to - it's just that time is moving at a different rate for them!

There is a way to understand the difference between the attention span of a young child and that of an adult by considering the definition of time.

Aristotle's definition of "time" is "the measure of motion according to the before and after." This means...

In the mid-1970's, I went off for my first year of college. I didn't have much money, but I had the opportunity to get at least one year of college at a great college. My major would be Liberal Arts. Back then, I had no interest at all in teaching; I had never given a moment's thought to ever being a teacher.

At the same time, my parents first heard about homeschooling and parent-run schools. It was terribly hard to do in those days, compared to now. Homeschooling was against the law at that time. Actually, Pennsylvania law back then said that it was entirely at the discretion of the local...