Observation of two mathematics lessons, one for a Year 12 and one for a Year 10: Probably the most important thing for a tutor is the ability to connect with students, which luckily is something which both the tutors I observed for this session and tutors in past observations have mostly been extremely successful in achieving. From what I can see there are 3 big main reasons why being able to connect with a student is so helpful when tutoring them across all subjects. Firstly, being able to become pseudo friends with a student makes the session overall less boring for the student. If you are actually enjoying a conversation with someone you are going to pay more attention and absorb more from the conversation. Additionally, making the lesson less like a chore reduces the incentive to just get through the lesson so they can go do something else. Secondly, a comfortable student is more likely to ask the tutor questions. If it is too awkward to bear talking with a tutor, they are not going to ask any questions, and questions are incredibly important for judging the progress and understanding of the student. Thirdly, it makes the student more able to take criticism. If you don’t like someone, you are going to be more predisposed to just ignoring any criticisms out of hand, not because of any ideas on your part but just because the person you don’t like is making them, and this of course applies to students as well. Especially for subjects with less concrete solutions such as English, if every time you try to point out an error the student has this knee jerk reaction of ignoring the criticism their going to struggle to grow their understanding from the lesson. For tutoring, regardless of subject, connection is the foundation upon which understanding of the topic rests.
Dimitri Wyatt Sikes Williams
