Why Bring Your Child to a
Tutor?
By Richard McManus
Reprinted from the October 2003 Kidding
Around
There are many different reasons for using a
tutoring service for your child. The top three that we encounter
are; 1) my child is falling behind and I want to assure success, 2)
although my child is doing okay, the work seems too difficult
and demanding and I want to lighten the burden and 3) my child is
competing for the top grades and/or is about to take standardized
tests it is important that this continue.
There is at least one other and quite different
reason for sending a child to a tutor. Some parents send their
children to a tutor as a punishment for doing poorly in school. They
hope that the tutor will provide attention but be so unpleasant that
the child will work hard to avoid the tutoring experience. This
might be called the scared straight motivation for tutoring.
These different interests lead to a number of
different tutoring paths. There are services that primarily help
children who are struggling or significantly behind in school. Some
services primarily serve children who are preparing for tests. There
are services that aim to lighten the load, often by helping the
child to get their homework done and serving as an extension of the
school. Lastly there are centers that provide a broad spectrum of
services to address any or all of these various issues.
There are roughly three groups of providers for
tutoring. One is national chains, such as Lindamood-Bell, Huntington
Learning, SCORE or Stanley Kaplan. The second group is smaller,
locally owned businesses, such as The Fluency Factory, and the last
and largest group is individual tutors either traveling to the home
of the student or delivering services from their homes. Frequently
the home-based tutor is a local teacher, or a retired teacher who
wants to continue to teach.
Just as there are specialty areas for various
tutoring services, there are also strengths and weaknesses to each
approach. The various specialties are quite different in price,
duration, and effectiveness. Tutoring prices reflect the local
economy and cannot be relied upon as an assurance of quality.
Each approach has its own abilities to provide the
following benefits.
- Tutoring can provide personal attention and
highly individualized instruction and feedback. Sometimes a child
feels lost in a room of 25 or 30 kids, or the teacher is simply
unable to provide assistance to the quiet learner who does not
rock the boat. These overlooked children often do extremely well
when they are given increased feedback and attention to their
learning.
- Sometimes a child is gifted but it is not really
appropriate to advance the child to the next grade. Tutoring can
offer fresh and individualized challenges to keep the child
excited about learning.—while continuing the important peer
relationships and age groupings that the child already enjoys.
- A tutor is not a parent!
Despite having wonderful relationships with their children parents
frequently find that they have difficulty helping their children
with learning. Children are often more willing to open their minds
in one-on-one academic settings when parent-child dynamics aren't
involved.
- Having a tutor makes many children feel special.
Tutoring can provide individualized coaching in the same way that
gifted athletes are often privately trained. The result is often
increased confidence and willingness to take on more difficult
challenges.
- The current teaching methodologies
in most of the South Shore school systems are not based upon the
most recent research in reading. Tutors can provide the phonics,
phonemic awareness and other fluency components that are not yet
fully implemented in public schools. This can mean a dramatic
difference in reading skills for the child.
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