19. The best and the worst?
I don’t know from direct experience whether or not this is true. My personal experience tends to contradict it. However, I have been told this by more than one tutor whom I have interviewed, and out of respect for their combined depth of experience, I include it here. As always, you be the judge and integrate it into your methodology if it works for you.
The claim is that for certain subjects – the sciences in general, and mathematics in particular – the visitors to the LSC tend to fall into one of two broad categories: those who really understand the subject matter quite well, and those who don’t get it at all.
Under this theory, the visitors to the LSC in the first group – those who really understand the subject matter quite well – are those students who come in to the LSC, sit down, and work by themselves for hours at a time. They may – only very occasionally – ask a tutor to explain some subtle nuance of what they are studying. They may also ask “why” something is so, or otherwise inquire beyond the scope of what they are required to learn. We tutors experience them as very bright individuals, and often we work with them in more of a “peer mode”, an example of which is when they ask something that we tutors don’t know off the top of our head, and so we and the student explore the problem together. These are the best examples of situation where it can be helpful to ask the student to “teach the tutor” everything that they know about the problem, in order to bring the tutor up to speed with what the student has already discovered. Some tutors really love this, but others don’t like it at all. As a result, it is important to match these kinds of students with those tutors who take the more inquiring view of mathematics than those who are just working the problems.
On the other hand, some students come in and cause the tutor to wonder, “how did they make it to this level of math, given their poor level of basic math skills. This is particularly evident when students in Finite Math or Calculus arrive in the LSC without basic Algebra skills. Another place you see it is in Algebra students who cannot do fractions, decimals, or percents.
There can be differing views of how to approach students who lack the basic prerequisites for the classes that they are trying to take. One is to focus on the basic skills, and to try to “catch up” in that manner. Another, somewhat controversial approach, is to allow the student to “write off” those problems that involve fractions, decimals, or whatever manipulations that they cannot do, and try to pass the course by doing the true course material on only those problems where prerequisite shortcomings don’t appear. To many – especially educational purists – this latter approach sounds absolutely terrible. In my early years of tutoring, I held this position. I absolutely contended that if you could not do basic arithmetic, a student should be prohibited from taking an algebra class. Over the years, my attitude has mellowed as my philosophy has evolved.
Here is the explanation that I offer to rationalizing the permitting of people to blunder their way though math when they don’t really understand what is going on in certain areas. These days, there is a minimal math requirement for almost every major that a person could choose. Physical therapists are required to pass Brief Calculus. History majors have to pass College Algebra. For these people, math is not an interesting topic to study and to enjoy. It is an obstacle to being able to work at the job that they want to do. I have come to the personal philosophy that a person who wants to be a physical therapist – and who perhaps has real talents such as good interpersonal skills, physical strength, and a real “human touch” – should not be obstructed from achieving that for want of being able to pass a Calculus class. Math (or any subject) does not provide a service to society when it constitutes a hurdle to personal achievement in non-mathematical areas. It is for this reason that I as a tutor consider it equally important to help the history major achieve their passing C grade as it is to help the math major achieve their A grade.
As a side note, I am an engineer who works all day with engineers. What percent of engineers do you think uses the Calculus that they learned in their college programs? I can tell you from direct experience that it is less than 1%. Given that, how silly is it to require people in the social sciences and the arts to have to take Calculus?
Of course, doing so does provide more job opportunities for us tutors, so I guess that there is a silver lining to every cloud after all.