3rd April 2020 15:09
By Blue Tutors
People are often interested in what we tutor at Blue Tutors. the answer is always “everything!”, but in reality 75% is GCSE and A Level tuition, and mainly the subjects one would expect: maths, English and the sciences at GCSE and below, and the popular subjects at A Level. However, every so often we come across students with unusual requests, a request which doesn’t fit into a nice category where we can easily identify the best tutor for that student.
We were recently asked to help with maths tuition, but the request actually came from one of our tutors, and looking at his qualifications, we could see that he is a very good mathematician. What he wanted was help with problems requiring a creative solution, rather than a method which can be learnt and applied to all similar problems. How do we find a tutor for something on which we have no data? Is a maths tutor even the best person to help?
It’s something which has always caused a problem, but we’re now thinking that we should just let every tutor see requests which aren’t easily categorised; they are few and far between so shouldn’t swamp the more standard requests.
It actually brings into focus the role of a tutor. We obviously ensure that any tutor we match with a student is an expert at that particular subject, but is that really what the student needs? In a situation like the one above, the student really needs someone to develop a critical way to think about problems. This could be a tutor who is actually an English graduate! Not that we would ever do that, but it might be the case one day that tutors are less subject focussed, and more like coaches, who train students to develop skills, rather than being so fixated on the content of what is to be studied.