Every home-work help session in on-line tutoring is like a soccer game, where tutors are goal keepers. The soccer ball could come from anywhere and at any moment. The goal keeper should be ready to react to different situations. Similarly, a tutor may not know anything in advance about the question that’s going to be posed in a session, nor the nature or knowledge of the student. He/she may have to start tutoring from the scratch for a high school student. Here’s one such chemistry session that I did a while ago:

It was a high-school student so I had to teach some high-school topic to that student. I started the session by pushing a picture of the periodic table on the white board. After that, I asked, “What do you see on the board?”. “ crossword puzzle table.. lol I don’t know. but similar stuff is over there in my science lab,” said the student. Fortunately, the student was aware of some terms like elements and compounds, which I found out later on during the session. I used a house as an example and explained how different things are arranged in different rooms of the house like the entrance hall, kitchen, bed room, etc. I correlated the things of in a house with elements and rooms with periods and groups, and the student finally understood the periodic table. The satisfaction that I got at the end of the session was enormous. This is why I like tutoring and strive to improve my tutoring skills- Wilson, Grade Results, Inc

Tags: e-learning, E-tutoring, education, Math, online tutoring, teaching

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 1:18 pm and is filed under The Value of Tutoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.