24th March 2014 9:00
By Blue Tutors
I had an interesting conversation with a friend last week who was asking about becoming a tutor with us. Her main worry was about remembering everything that students need to know, and since she’s only hoping to tutor for a few months, not having enough time to revise everything. What surprised me was my response. I pointed out that with longer term tuition it’s advisable to focus much more on understanding and really get to grips with our teaching guidelines, and that ideally a tutor elicits knowledge from the student (albeit that the tutor should have the knowledge him/herself). However, with tuition close to exams, which is what my friend would be doing, ‘ideal’ tutoring isn’t necessarily what is best for the student; often rote-learning can yield better short-term results. It just made me really uncomfortable to be endorsing a kind of tutoring that I really hate.