Finding the Right Tutor Means Doing Your Homework

Evelyn Raab remembers feeling totally shell shocked when she first discovered that her seventeen-year-old son Dustin was in danger of failing his high school algebra class. “He had always been a really good student—someone who had never gotten anything under an 80,” the Millbrook, Ontario, parent recalls. “But when it came to algebra, he was just floundering.”

Like many parents, Raab was initially unaware of how badly Dustin was struggling with his algebra course. After all, he hadn’t exactly broadcasted his problems at home! Dustin remained unwilling to admit to his parents or anyone else how desperately he needed help until the situation had gone from bad to worse. “It was like conceding defeat for him to admit there was a problem. He wanted to grapple with it on his own,” his mother recalls.

Eventually the moment of truth arrived and Dustin had to admit to both his parents and himself that he wasn’t going to make it through the course on his own. At that point, Raab found herself faced with the rather overwhelming task of finding a tutor who could work miracles or near-miracles during the remaining weeks of the course.

The feelings of shock and dismay that Raab experienced when her son began running into trouble in algebra class are not at all unusual. According to Malcolm Cunningham, Co-ordinator of Tutor-Ink, a tutoring program that is operated through Queen’s University’s Faculty of Education, parents are often unaware of how much difficulty a child is experiencing at school until their child brings home a report card with frighteningly bad grades. And given that as many as one-third of students are in need of tutoring at any given time, that makes for a lot of shell-shocked parents come report card day.

That’s not to say that there aren’t any clues ahead of time that there could be a problem. According to Cunningham, parents should at least consider that possibility if their child seems to be avoiding certain types of homework (e.g. math problems or writing assignments) or appears to be reluctant to go to school, or if the quality of his work seems to be substandard or deteriorating in quality.

Once parents have determined that there is, in fact, a problem, it’s time to go into action mode. That means getting in touch with the child’s teacher and principal and gathering as much information as they can about the problem. You need to know whether your child is having difficulty in a single subject or whether he lacks specific skills that are affecting his performance across a number of different subject areas.

It’s at this point that many parents fall into the do-it-yourself trap, says Nick Whitehead, president of Oxford Learning Centres, a London, Ontario, based tutoring company with more than 50 centres nationwide. “They hit the local Scholar’s Choice store and load up on workbooks and other teaching materials and then try to use boot camp-like tactics to teach their children. It’s an approach that does more harm than good and can lead to strife between parent and child.”

A better approach, according to Whitehead, is to start researching what tutoring services are available in your community. That means consulting your Yellow Pages, making some preliminary phone calls, and checking references for the various tutoring services you’re considering.