How to tutor your kids (or someone else’s for that matter)
Alcibiades being tutored by Socrates
1. Main thing is having interesting material. All the famous schools you’ve heard of, and lots of great ones you haven’t, publish their past exam papers. Eton’s King’s Scholarship papers are particularly brilliant. Pick a subject, and a paper, that interests you. If you’re enjoying yourself, there’s half a chance your student will too. If you’re not enjoying yourself, not so much.
2. I always turn up with a folder containing 4-5 times as much material as I need for a lesson. Two copies of everything, of course, so we don’t need to read over each other’s shoulder. Then I push it towards them. “This is yours. You choose something for us to look at.”
3. As a teacher you need to maintain some kind of control over the course of the lesson, albeit with welcome, student-sparked digressions. As a tutor it’s different. You should give up as much control over the direction of the tutorial as is possible.
4. Notice the difference between bored, frustrated, and tired. Curable by, respectively, changing to a different subject; asking a pointed question/ giving them a clue/ giving the answer; taking a 5-15 minute break/ reading to them/ quitting for the day.
5. Tutoring scholarship students is like meeting a younger version of me. They’re all very different of course, but like me they’ve accepted the challenge of doing something that tests the outer level of their intellect, with a modest chance of success and a high chance of failure, because, whether or not they already have a guaranteed place at that school, it’s the most interesting choice to make at that point in their lives.
6. Give them space. Sit at a right-angle from your student, at the corner of a table that’s big enough that you can sit two or three metres away from each other. You want them to concentrate on the text, not on you.
7. Give them time. Read the texts together in silence. Underline and make brief notes as you read, and encourage them to do the same. We scribble down our thoughts, as we do our workings out in Maths, not because examiners tell us to, but because it frees up space in our brains to think about the next part of the problem, or question, or poem.
8. 80% of your job is formulating and asking open questions, questions that lead to other thoughts and other questions after that.
9. Display your ignorance. Let them see you struggle, and keep going despite that struggle. Even Homer nods.
10.Show off occasionally. Purely from doing this job for 12 years, I can do mental arithmetic pretty quickly. So when my student goes for the calculator, I like to race them. I can do the powers of five in my head quite fast because parents whose children are applying for six schools that accept one in five candidates want to know what the odds are of them being accepted to all those schools. The odds are (1/5)6 which means not 1/5 or 1/25 or 1/125 or 1/625 or 1/3125, but 1/15,625.
11.Study a poem that you’ve memorised beforehand (maybe decades beforehand). Surprise them by reading it aloud without the use of your copy.
12.All this is modelling behaviour that you want them to adopt.
13.Focus on their, and your favourite subjects, at least to start with. I did when I was at school, and now I teach four or five subjects pretty well.
14.Tutorials. Should. Go. At. The. Slowest. Pace. Possible. Without. Either. Of. You. Getting. Bored. If it takes you both an hour to get through one Maths problem, that was time well spent. If it took thirty seconds on the other hand, you might be wasting your time: maybe you should probably try a harder paper. If you already know the answer, or think you do, use that time to silently invent questions you can ask your student that might lead him or her to that answer – or perhaps to a completely different one that neither of you had considered before. These are the best moments in my tutorials, the moments I remember. I love it when I’m wrong and they’re right, and I think my students do too, though they’re too polite to gloat about it.