10 Guidelines to being your Child’s Best Tutor

On a weekday, at nine in the morning, my three sons congregate around the dining room table for home-schooling. Like tutoring, much of my instruction happens one-on-one with each of my kids, ages 4, 6, and 9. The process is not always perfect or pretty, but we get through it and, get this—we have fun! Learning is supposed to be fun, but tutoring doesn’t always feel this way for many parents.

After years of teaching my own children and observing hundreds of home-schoolers and parents, I now understand that a kid’s capacity for learning is seldom the real obstacle to a good tutoring relationship between parent and child. Most often, we are the problem!

We are so concerned with our child’s academic standing that we lose sight of the more important goals of academic instruction. Quizzes, tests, exams, and report cards are given way too much glory. My child has to pass this test. My child has to get a good grade. My child has to have nothing lower than 90 percent on his report card. My child has to be number one in class. Have we ever asked ourselves why?

It wasn’t until I removed myself from the vortex of a system that measures success by grade point averages that I began to truly understand the goals of instruction. I’m not here to tell you to pull your kids out of the educational system and home-school them. That is my personal choice. But I do want to encourage you to be very hands-on with your kids’ education.

[previous|page|next]

I believe parents make the best teachers because we love and know our kids best. We just need some guidelines. These tips will help get you started.

1. Prioritize your relationship with your child before academic goals.
We need to assure our kids that we love them unconditionally. Their class standing and report cards should not make them feel more loved—or less loved—by us. When my eldest son, Elijah, once expressed his dislike for writing, I hugged him and said, “I love you no matter what, but I am also committed to helping you become a better writer.” Did I want to say this in the gentle way I did? No way! I wanted to correct him and lecture him on the importance of writing skills. But I weighed the two responses and decided to value our relationship over academic goals. I often ask myself, “Will my negative reaction make us closer, or will it push my child away? If my reactions push him away, how could I teach him?”

2. Focus on character.
Last year, I attended a seminar by America’s most well-read parenting expert, Dr. John Rosemond. He said, “I did not know my ABCs or 123s when I entered elementary, but I knew how to obey and listen to my teacher. My classmates were the same. We didn’t have any problems learning because we were taught by our parents to obey. In today’s classrooms, most teachers spend a good amount of time dealing with behavior management because the children don’t listen.”

An obedient and respectful child has the disposition for attentiveness that makes him teachable. We put way too much emphasis on getting preschoolers to read and write when we should be working on their character. If my child is a genius but doesn’t know the virtues of honesty, hard work, and responsibility, would he really be successful? In contrast, a child who has internalized virtues such as responsibility and perseverance will study hard and well for an exam without being forced to. He will do his homework. Character makes our kids’ hearts ready for instruction.

3. Say “do your best,” and not “be the best.”
The first is about cultivating an internal gauge for excellence. The second is about competition and making others the standard. I find the latter to be problematic. Case in point: If your child wins the spelling bee and beats 20 other kids who are mediocre spellers, he may be the best, but compared to what? Furthermore, the unfortunate reality of class standing is there is only one number-one spot. Not every child can occupy this spot. But every child can be challenged to give his best (and many who try their best end up being the best, too!) Best effort should be applauded, and this is different from handing out 10th place trophies to children.

When my kids present their work to me, I ask them, “Did you do your best?” If they say “Yes,” I don’t say, “No, you didn’t!” or “I don’t believe you.” I give them the benefit of the doubt. But my husband Edric and I make it our responsibility to teach our kids what best effort means based on their capacities. And we affirm them when we see them try hard which encourages them to keep doing so. We also let our kids memorize this verse: “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might” (Ecclesiastes 9:10 NASB).

[previous|page|next]

4. Integrate.
The school system, with its segregated approach to learning (age, levels, classes, sections, quarters, semesters, and years) seems to give kids a shortterm perspective. The mentality is “I can’t wait till the break” or “I just have to pass the next test.” We need an integrated approach to teaching our children. Kids must see a purposeful connection between the various subjects, life, and learning, as well as present and future success. Elijah didn’t like math when he was younger. He was short of hating it. It wasn’t until I told him that math is important for our everyday existence that he began to show interest in it. I remember asking him, “How can you celebrate your birthday if you don’t understand counting?” “How would you know how to buy things at a store if you couldn’t add?” It’s been years since then and math has become his favorite subject. But it was necessary for him to see the connection between math and life first.

5. Don’t always teach.
Be a student, too. Gerry and Girlie Argosino home-schooled their son, Josh, for 10 years. Josh is now in his second year high at Ateneo de Manila. I asked Gerry how he managed to teach trigonometry to Josh when he was in high school. He said, “We learned together. We worked on the problems together. He would try and I’d try. I had to teach myself all over again while I taught him.” As Gerry studied with Josh, it encouraged Josh to learn. They were in it together. Gerry wasn’t a math expert, but this didn’t make him any less effective as Josh’s math teacher.

6. Encourage self-directed learning.
A self-directed learner knows where to go for information. He doesn’t need to wait for the next lesson or lecture to learn about a topic. More importantly, he has the ability to grasp information and process what he sees and hears on his own. Certainly there is a lot more to this than reading ability. It’s about comprehension. Jeff Wong, former manager of The Tutoring Club at Fun Ranch in Frontera Verde in Pasig City, says, “The biggest problem of the kids who come to our center is not math or reading; it’s comprehension. They don’t know how to process information that is verbally delivered to them or that they see or read. We have to work on their comprehension first. Once they are able to comprehend, they experience success in math and reading, too.”

7. Look for higher-order thinking skills.
Kids often cope with school requirements by memorizing most of what they need to learn. Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains reveals that in the spectrum of higher-order thinking skills, creating is the highest, while memorizing facts and information is at the bottom of the pyramid. It is necessary to retain information to pass a quiz or test, but what do our kids really need to survive college or the work place? They need to be able to analyze the facts, form their own opinions and judgments, and come up with creative solutions to problems.

[previous|page|next]

8. Motivate using interests.
Learning becomes fun when a child’s interest is piqued. I used marbles to teach my third son, Titus, counting and simple addition. He was motivated because he really liked marbles. Ani Torres, who was a professional tutor for over 15 years and a special education teacher, suggests, “Get into your child’s personal life. Discover his interests, and use these as a spring board for learning. If your child likes cars, use cars to introduce a lesson.”

9. Apply learning styles.
Every child has the capacity to learn, but not everyone learns the same way. If you want your child to grasp a difficult concept, don’t teach it the same way he has been learning it in the classroom. Obviously, this hasn’t been working or you wouldn’t have to re-teach it. There are many books written by experts on learning styles so I won’t go into detail. But here is its essence: The teacher must adjust to the learner (and not the other way around). Private tutor Anita Lim talks about how learning styles work. “My student, who is learning algebra, likes to interact while studying, so I make our lessons interactive. We talk about badminton, reading the Bible, movies—and then I connect these to math. It makes her very responsive.”

10. Be positive!
What child would not want to be tutored by someone who is an encourager and motivator? We need to smile, laugh, hug, play games, give rewards, and give lots of affirmation when we are tutoring our kids. Let’s avoid negative comments and a militant disposition that can make them dread our tutoring. Do any of these statements sound familiar?: ‘Why can’t you get it?’ ‘What’s wrong with you?’ ‘You’re so stupid! This is so easy!’ ‘If you don’t get this, I’m going to...’ ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister?’ If we need to correct our children, let’s use a more positive approach. My mom used to apply the “sandwich approach” with me and my siblings, i.e., the correction is “sandwiched” between layers of encouragement. Sounds more appetizing, right?

Let me end with the bigger picture for tutoring. When Edric and I chose to home-school, we knew that teaching our kids would be our daily, inescapable reality. To prepare ourselves for the daunting task, we began with a definition of life success. Our basis was a passage in the Bible (Deuteronomy 6:4- 7): that our children would grow up to love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

If our instruction is headed in this direction, then we are doing just fine. If our methods, the content of what we teach, or our perspectives are leading us away from this goal, then we make a
U-turn, backtrack, or find a way to get back on course.

Have you considered what life success is for your child? Effective tutoring will begin here, with the bigger picture that gives meaning and direction to your daily instruction. The next time you sit down with your child to teach him a subject, look past the urgency of studying for exams or the need to cope with academic requirements. Tutoring is much more important than helping your child make the grade or excel in class. It is your chance to prepare him for life success—a task that no one else can do better than you!

Joy Tan Chi Mendoza is a homeschooling mother of four.


Image from hardik.practutor.com