Picture this: your student is looking at a long, wordy maths problem and looks at you with a face that pleads for the confusion to end and asks “what do I do next?”

The easy option would be to tell them the next step. You would continue to move along the question, and the hair-pulling frustration never occurs. But instead, you ask back, “What information do they give you in the question, and what are you able to do with it?”

The student rolls their eyes, dramatically sighs and gives you the look of I’m paying you to help me, not interrogate me. In the world of tutoring, being a tutor that doesn’t hand over the answer essentially makes you a professional “annoying person”.

But here’s the reality, giving a student the answer is the fastest way to make sure they never fully understand it. It’s like going to the gym and asking the trainer to lift the dumbbells for you. The weights are moved, but your muscles are still exactly the same.

When you ask your student questions, you force their brain to do the heavy lifting. We might spend 10 minutes staring at a single algebraic problem that I could solve in thirty seconds. To the student, it feels like we are stuck and wasting time.

But then it happens.

It clicks! The frustration clears and they find themselves figuring out what the answer is independently. The shift from “I can’t do this” to “I just solved this.” They might start the session hating my questions, but they leave the session being able to implement their understanding and problem solving process into future questions in their homework and exams. Eventually, the “thank you” comes not from the answers I provided, but for the confidence they gained by realising they didn’t need me in the first place.

Lainey Ku