Most students who struggle in class aren’t struggling because they’re not smart. They’re struggling because something earlier didn’t quite stick, and the class moved on without them.

That’s where tutoring comes in.

The best thing about one on one tutoring is that there’s nowhere to hide, but also no need to. A student who’d never ask a question in front of 30 classmates will ask it when it’s just the two of you. That changes everything. You can actually find the gap, go back, and fix it.

The job isn’t to do the work for them. It’s to stay one step ahead of where they’re at and pull them forward slowly. Sometimes that means explaining the same thing three different ways until one of them lands. Sometimes it means going back further than you expected, realising the problem isn’t the current topic at all but something from six months ago that was never fully understood. Sometimes it just means shutting up and letting them think.

It’s not glamorous work. A lot of sessions are just sitting at a kitchen table going through problems one by one. There’s no audience, no big reveal. But the progress is real and you see it up close, which is more than most teachers get.

And occasionally a student will come in defeated and leave having figured something out on their own. That’s the whole point, really. Not that they got the right answer, but that they started to believe they could find it.

Justin Ho