21st July 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Continuing on from an article written last week, there is another reason to explain why private tuition is becoming more prevalent than a few years ago, and that’s to do with the actual students, and how each new generation of young people is different from the last. It might be a cliché, and something one hears predominantly from an aging generation, but it’s also widely reported by experienced teachers; the accusation is that students today have a much smaller attention span.
Now an argument against this decreased attention span is that A Level and GCSE results have improved year upon year, and that this wouldn’t be possible if students were having trouble concentrating. Of course, this opens the debate on difficulty of exams in 2011, which we won’t go into, but there is a possibly that would explain shorter attention spans and at the same time still produce improved exam results.
The complaint from teachers is that in the modern world children rarely focus on anything for much longer than five minutes. Whether it’s a TV programme, computer game or anything else, kids today want to be entertained, and they want it quickly. Fewer children are playing board games, or doing any activity that involves a considerable time commitment. As a result, some teachers feel that asking children to listen and focus for an hour in a classroom is a difficult proposition.
We have found that many parents approach us and say that their son or daughter simply isn’t getting what they need from lessons at school, and would like a tutor. The result is often that the student quickly improves, and attention span is far less of a problem when the student is much involved in the lesson, as they are with one-to-one tuition.
Of course this shouldn’t reflect badly on teachers or the school system. It’s not their fault that attention spans are shortening, but it still means that classroom learning is becoming less and less fit for purpose in our modern world, and if students are turning to tutors and doing better in exams as a result, then maybe it’s time to realise that, in many cases, tuition can just provide so much more than a classroom can.