16. Drop-in tutoring is the hardest
“Drop in” tutors have a particularly difficult job, because they need to switch from class to class (branch of math to branch of math) as frequently as once every 5 minutes. And they need to keep that up for a solid 4 to 8 hours! Don’t underestimate the difficulty of doing this before you begin doing drop-in tutoring, and be sure to give yourself lots of credit after successfully doing it for a sizeable block of time.
There are some techniques that you can use to make this a bit easier. Perhaps the best one is to “team” with the other drop-in tutors in order to provide a daily strategy that makes it easier for everyone. The simplest form of strategy is to decide that each individual will be primarily (though not exclusively) responsible for a particular level of student (algebra, calculus, finite, etc) that particular day. That helps a tutor reduce the variation in topics he or she must jump among. Of course, you can only do this subject to limitations of student traffic levels, tutor competencies and tutor/student compatibility circumstances. Still, despite these constraining factors, when tutors focus on particular course levels on a given working day, they experience less cognitive load then when they jump randomly across the entire spectrum of math levels.
Another technique – usable by those tutors who have an excellent memory for faces or for people – is to intentionally create a remembered association between a student and a functional learning area (e.g. factoring, logarithms and exponentials, derivatives). That way, when the tutor returns to the student, the tutor can also mentally return to the functional learning area. When successfully utilized, this technique can reduce the re-accommodation that occurs when a tutor moves from, say, and algebra student to a calculus student, and vice versa. The reason is that most people move more easily from person to person than from situation to situation. Most of us – including tutors – are optimized for social interaction and do it very well. Some tutors can be very successful at intentionally remembering their roster of ‘active” students and their associated study areas, while others with less flexible memories will not. In passing, I will mention that this technique is frequently used by special area teachers in elementary schools as a means of facilitating smooth transfers between individual special-needs students and their individual-student learning plans.
As you become a more experienced tutor, you will probably develop various coping techniques of your own. After a few years, you won’t even notice the transitions that drop-in tutors must accommodate. In the beginning of your tutoring career, you should anticipate this difficulty and “allow” yourself to find it a difficult behavior, and one for which experience will refine your skills over time.