The Gleeful/Frustrated Tutor Thread

Do any of you tutor/have tutored? What was your experience with it? What is the best and worst thing about it, for you? What do you feel worked best when tutoring?

I tutor a girl in English and History. She has some learning disabilities, which makes things difficult, and I don't expect her to excel. I only expect her to put effort. However, she gets away with not doing her work from her family, so it's very difficult to enforce anything. She will just get up and walk around, and try to play hockey in her living room, listen to music, etc. It's frustrating because as someone who wants to go into the teaching field, I wanted this to be practice. I feel like I do this girl's work more than anything else. It's very frustrating.

At times though, I do feel like it helps me prepare for teaching, in that I have to find new ways to explain things to her. She has the most trouble in History, so I'm always trying to simplify things like pre-WW2 in a way that she can understand and remember. To be able to teach in many ways is important for someone who is a teacher.

What does work best with her is doing games. She's usually very poor at vocabulary, but we decided to do a word matching game to help her study, and she did so much better than usual. I may have to keep that in mind. It does help.

:jess:

I have officially tutored in math and physics in high school. It was like one hour a week after school. Basically I would go over their homework with them and explain things they did not understand. Not so bad. I tutored two people at school and private tutored one o my friends (her parents insisted paying me to my dismay). My friend was pretty easy to tutor since it was more of once she knew what was going on, she understood it.

"Unofficially" I would help my neighbour in Chem, basically I would go over and help her with her homework, explaining things and making jokes when she defied the laws of nature (not in a mean way, we both laughed). I was also known as a go-to before a test. I had literally once opened a textbook and gave an abridged version of Canadian history. The latter was not so much tutoring as leading a cram session. I personally liked helping people because I find it is only when you try to explain it that you can truly know if you understand the material.

I have trouble making myself understood with people I know. I doubt think i could realistically expect to succeed as a tutor. i don't have enough patience for people that don't understand fast enough xD it frustrates me xD

I have tutored several times.. always in physics and mathmatics, twice for school.. and once for a girl in my neighbourhood.. *remembers akward situations*

anyway.. twas pretty fun, but i wouldnt do it for a living.. teaching, that is..

i dont have the patience :p

As part of my Creativity Action Service (150 hours extra curricular stuff, basically) for my International Baccalaureate diploma, I tutored a friend of mine in GCSE Short Course German for a while. Covered the basics with her, used some of my old worksheets with my answers erased (the joys of having a scanner). I had a pretty positive experience from the whole thing, actually and wouldn't mind doing it again. I enjoy helping people and I enjoy the fact that the fact that I'm tutoring means I'm refreshing and revising things in my own mind as well.

Wow, that's an awful lot of tutoring. xD I only had to do 20 hours of tutoring. Well, technically I should be doing 40. I called another girl who needed tutoring after I started working for $$$, but she never responded, and I'm too lazy to get another 20 hours for National Honor Society~ <3

I only did 20 myself. The 150 hours is made up of lots of different activities. I don't think you're allowed more than 20 on a single activity though. I still enjoyed it and wouldn't mind doing it again though. Though perhaps I'd think differently after 150 hours of it.