When I started tutoring in first year uni, I was optimistic. “High school maths is simple and logical! Everyone can learn it. All they need is the proper attention.” I thought that I could get any student to past with test scores in the 90s. How hard could it be? But now, after four years of tutoring, I have concluded that some people are lost causes.
One of my first students was my most troubling. I taught her maths for three years. For those three years, she represented almost half my tutoring income; I taught her three hours a week!
Even going at three hours a week and scaling up to six hours coming closer to exams, she still needed more time. The problem was that her English skills were quite poor. She was an international student from Taiwan. Besides teaching her maths, I also had to throw together ad-hoc English and comprehension lessons. Hell, I even helped her in her Business Management, English and Graphics assessments. Who on earth let her choose all these supposedly “easy” subjects that depend on your language comprehension and expression skills?
Comprehension skills are vital in VCE maths, especially in Further Maths, where all the problems are based on ‘real-life’. Sometimes, I think she would have been better off in Methods or even Specialist. She was smart enough to get the maths bits but she always fell down at the initial problem definition stage.
In the end, as exams barrelled down towards us, I resorted to teaching her pattern recognition. “Okay, if the exam says, “What does Pearson’s correlation of 0.23 indicate?” then you must write, “23% of the variation in [variable y] is due to variation in [variable x].” ” But between every lesson, she would forget the patterns. She admitted that she didn’t practice and her laziness would be the undoing of her.
When the Year 12 results came out, I tried to call her. Her mobile number was disconnected. I gave up ever getting in contact with her again. Then a few weeks later, she called me and gave me the news. She had gotten 39 for her ENTER. This is a disaster for someone whose parents are paying tens of thousands of dollars for her to study in Australia. I felt like I had failed too, even though I know her Business and English scores must have dragged the mark down.
I had no reason to speak to her for two years. I assumed she went back to Taiwan to face her family’s wrath. Then today, I find a missed call from an unknown mobile number. I call it back — it’s her! It turns out she’s still in Australia doing some sort of further study. She tells me that she needs to re-learn the Further Maths course. So now, after a two year break, we have another lesson on Monday at 10 AM.
Life is strange.
Latest holiday entry:
In my one year of tutoring, I found that the biggest problem with all of the kids I tutored was that they were lazy, not that they were stupid. All my students could do what I asked of them, and come up with decent essays (for English) and correct and sensible answers (for Physics) when I was sitting there, prodding them along.
Every week, I’d leave them homework. It normally would’ve been something like “Finish off that essay we started today”, or “Do a practice exam and see how you go.”
They’d never do it. Sometimes, they said they had completed the task, but I never quite believed them. “I did it, but I gave it to the teacher to correct and she said I could pick it up this afternoon.” I offered to reschedule the session to the afternoon, but of course they declined.
Then there are other smaller problems, especially in English — the kids can’t write quickly (and legibly), and their spelling and sentence structure are terrible. I’m not sure who to blame for this.
I’m going to contact one of my students, my most regular one, on Tuesday when the VTAC results come out and see if he got into what he wanted, and hopefully find out what score he got for English. If he followed the formula I gave him for writing issues analysis essays, I’m sure he would have scored a “B” or better, which was what he was his goal.
I hope he wasn’t too lazy to memorise the formula, not that he had much time to forget it — our last session was two days before the final exam. He had taken a month-and-a-half break from me before that final session…
Posted by Vera