One of the important characteristics that people should have is confidence. Confidence does not come naturally. Most of the time, it needs stimulant in the form of encouragement.

I recently met with a number of students, who "needed" tutoring in math. What I normally do is ask the student what part of the subject does s/he have trouble with. The immediate answer normally would be "I don't know pretty much anything". This is then the hard part of tutoring - where do you start then? Is s/he really not understanding anything? Based on the notes provided, I would do a small review (typically in 5 mins), and start an example, see how much s/he can follow. Immediately, I post another example, and see how s/he would work it out. This would be the "moment of truth", and surprisingly, s/he knows a lot.

Constant encouragement is a powerful method of teaching. I can see that the student would be more pro-actively trying to solve the problem on their own when you constantly encourage them by leading them to the successful part. Of course, this is where the professionalism comes in; where you really have to understand the subject well. The student would be immediately discouraged and get bored if you are struggling with the subject itself. Of course no one is perfect, and sometimes creativity would come in to resolve any issue - which is beyond the topic of this post.

Over-confidence sometimes can also be an issue. The first question that you would ask is why the parents would still want a tutoring session if the kid has already understood the concept. What I can find out is some of these students make frequent careless mistakes. They think they can do math quickly, and too quickly can lead to errors. When doing math, sometimes care is more important than the concept.

I would encourage teachers to help stimulate the students courage in doing math. Of course this might be "bad" for tutoring business, but overall, we want our students do well in their math!

Experience the Difference - Math, Science, Engineering & Programming

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