26th May 2011 9:00
By Blue Tutors
When some people think of private tuition, they think of students studying for 3-4 hours after school every day, and even more on the weekend, having virtually no free time. Obviously in the majority of cases this isn’t the way tuition works, but it does sometimes, famously in China, Korea and Japan. At Blue Tutors this all seems slightly counter-intuitive, because, for us, it misses the point of private tuition.
We’ve said it before, but the eventual goal of a tutor should be to remove the student’s need for a tutor. This does mean that the better a tutor is, the fewer lessons they may have, and that’s not great for business, but we think it is what’s best for the student.
One could argue that once a tutor has improved a student’s proficiency in one subject, they can move onto the next, and there will always be something for the tutor to do, because there will always be new topics for the student to tackle. This is true to an extent, but it misses the deeper, and ultimately more valuable, reason for private tuition, and that’s to create a better student, not just a student who is better at a particular subject.
The style of teaching we endorse requires students to learn for themselves, and those techniques can be applied to the student’s learning in future. The idea that a student should begin private tuition at a very young age, and continue with it intensively until university, or even after that, is a very strange one, and really the tutor should be better at helping their student to learn independently, and not be so reliant on their tutor.
Do we still have some students who have intensive tuition? Of course, but it’s generally last minute help for students who really need to put in a lot of work before exams. For students who have been with us since they were young, if they do ask for a tutor now, it’s often for guidance and for help with something quite specific, and then those lessons are usually weekly, fortnightly or monthly; not so good for business, but better for our reputation.