On Tuition (again, again)

I am not sure how to think generally about tuition. I have previously written about why tuition, properly applied, might be valuable and what to think about if you are considering it for your children. I have, however, also written about why tuition can be a bad thing, and furthermore what parental involvement can look like in addition to or instead of tuition.

I sometimes think that there is no general way to think about tuition – that what works for some students, in some contexts, at certain points, is all that matters. If this is right then strong school guidance or even policy, as we are sometimes asked for, will never be appropriate. 

That said, I was struck by the confluence of writer Matthew Crawford’s account of working in a tuition centre, and a conversation I overheard between two students. Crawford notes that while working in a tuition centre the intellectual content of what I was offering was pretty close to zero – a few tips that could be put on one side of index card. But the classes and tutoring sessions provided a… setting that forced students to show up and to do practice tests; the benefit was mostly [helping] relieve students of the burden of self-regulation… and the parents of the burden of discipline.

This, then, puts a rather new spin in tuition; that the value is largely focusing the attention. Where there are a million distractions for students, and where parents’ working lives – and hence our  time to support our children – are ever more pressured, this makes complete sense. It also dovetails well with our experience that tuition can work wonders for some, but be a disaster for others, and this is where an overheard conversation comes in. It was about 4PM and I was talking with a student in the library. Two students were behind me, in a study booth working together on Maths homework. They did not know I could hear them, and the conversation went something like:

Student A: How do you do this question?
Student B: Just follow the rule.
Student A: But why? I don’t understand the rule… how does it work?
Student B: Look, just follow it, who cares how it works, that’s how you do it, that’s how you get it right.
Student A: But [Teacher] explained it in class, can you remember what she said?
Student B: No, who cares, my tutor can just shows me the rule, so I never have to listen to what [Teacher] says.

For my own interest, I looked up the academic records of those students – it turns out that student A was achieving two grades higher than student B in Maths. It’s almost enough to make me weep, even though one anecdote is just one anecdote. Because this is a concern that we have seen many times. Student B believed that her tutor would fix everything, and that led her to waste her time in class for her three maths lessons each week. I would suggest she was not well served by that belief – but the tutor was very well served indeed, of course, because a reliance on tutors is what supports his business model. I know not all tutors are like this, but I also know that some – intentionally or unintentionally – undermine confidence in schools, thus ensuring repeat business. This may be what happened here, I do not know, but it aligns with Kelvin Cheng’s research which suggests that if the guaranteed focused attention in tuition leads students to pay less attention in class (where the vast majority of learning should still happen), the net benefit may be negative. 

So what does this mean for us parents? Not that tuition can never be valuable (again, see the first link at the top of this article) but that we need to engage our children so that tuition builds on, not replaces, what happens at school. We need to open conversations so that they see that academic success will come from rich understandings that lead to rules and grades, which are the natural by-product, not the ends in themselves. Please to start these conversations; they may have greater effect than almost anything else we parents can do.

End note: Mathematics tuition seems to be of particular interest to our community. Here is a letter from our Maths department explaining what we offer as support, and why external maths tuition may not be as necessary as is sometimes perceived