*image credit pixabay
It’s been a year since I started freelancing as a tutor and it’s been great. I love the freedom that tutoring brings in terms of work/home balance but especially joyous is the opportunity to create lessons that will engage students in the learning process and help them progress in their education.
What has really struck me though is how much I have learned! As a literacy tutor I cover a range of topics because words are used to explain every subject (an unsurprising point perhaps but so often ‘literacy’ is conflated with ‘English’). However in preparing these cross curricular lessons, I frequently have to do my research first and study topics that I know little about! For example I have a student who is fascinated in outer space and particularly curious about the existence of ‘wormholes‘. They were an unknown concept for me but boy are they interesting and quite literally mind blowing (and mind bending!)
Another key feature of 1:1 tutoring lies with the individuality of each student. This may seem obvious and whilst in a classroom you are aware of the diversity of temperament and personality within the room, the crowded context does not allow for the week by week revealing of quirks, dislikes, interests and unique senses of humour that each student I tutor possesses. These ‘slow revealings’ guide me as I choose texts and plan activities that I am pretty sure will be appealing to a particular student. Of course this doesn’t always go according to plan but that is part of the teaching and learning process too – for student and tutor!