At Metatutor, we provide home one-to-one face-to-face maths tuition. In this blog, I will outline some of the many benefits this service can have on a student. I firmly believe that every student benefits from having some extra home support – it doesn’t matter whether you are a student targeting a Level 9 or a Level 4, a 10-year-old wanting to learn new topics to provide an extra challenge or a 16-year-old on the final stretch of your GCSE.
1. The student can ask as many questions as they want
At school, students often don’t ask questions if something isn’t making sense. This may be because they are shy or don’t want their peers to know they don’t understand. They also have 30 other students in the class and only one teacher, so often they don’t even get the chance. The problem with this is if the teacher spent a lesson on Pythagoras’ Theorem and the student didn’t understand it, they have a curriculum to teach and they will need to move on to another topic next lesson. So they can fall behind easily and a “snowball effect” can come into play – many topics can pass a student by without the required understanding. Having a tutor can allow the student to ask questions on what didn’t make sense in class. They can even bring their schoolbook and show the tutor! This is invaluable to helping students stay on top of the content they are learning in school.
2. Face-to-face support is invaluable
Maths is a subject that you can’t just cram for before an exam. It takes a lot of practice and repetition to master the techniques required to achieve good results. Most maths questions follow a formula or method, but the only way to improve at that is practice, practice, practice! Most of my lessons follow the same format – I’ll show you a new method, do a couple of examples, then you will try to do some on your own, and I will keep an eye on you to make sure you are doing it correctly – and intervene when required. Then if further explanation or examples from me are required, that is what I will do. That will depend strongly on how the session has gone and how the student is getting on doing the questions on their own. I need the close proximity to my tutee in order to check on what they are doing, assess their understanding of the content, and to allow the to-and-fro of the session to flow. There is a growing trend heading in the direction of online tuition, however I strongly believe this does not work for maths, so we do not offer this. I know that I and the rest of our tutors would not be able to do our jobs to the best of our abilities if we are not there face-to-face.
3. It’s at home, in a setting that the student is comfortable in
This is really important. As opposed to tuition that takes place in a school or a tuition centre, we do 99% of our tuition in the student’s home (in certain circumstances, if there are too many distractions in the home, we would consider doing the sessions in a library or another suitable location). This has a multitude of the benefits. After a whole day at school, the last thing a student wants is to have to head back out again for more lessons! Having the sessions at home allows the student to travel home from school, relax for a bit, and then get back into the swing of learning in the comfort of their own home! It also saves the parents driving their child somewhere.
4. The tuition is bespoke
Bespoke is a word I use a lot to describe the service we offer. What it means for a student is that the sessions can be whatever the student wants them to be. Our tutors will of course follow the school curriculum, and have a plan in place for each session, but the student can request to do whatever topic they want. Often, I plan to do a certain topic in a session, but on arrival my student will say something like “We were doing graph transformations in school and I was struggling with them, can you help me to understand this worksheet we did in school?”. And we will tackle that first. The student may also request that we cover the same topics as they are covering in school, to help keep up with the content they are learning in school. And, as is often the case with some of my students, if they are finding the content covered in school too easy – it may be more appropriate to start introducing new topics before it is taught in school, to give the student a head start and to challenge them. It is this flexibility that makes the service we offer so beneficial for our students – of all abilities.
5. Non-academic benefits
But don’t think that the benefits to our students are only academic – there are also many non-academic benefits to having a tutor. Personally, with some of my students, I end up tutoring them for 2+ years, and visiting the family for 1 hour a week allows me to get to know the child (and their family) very well. The only downside is saying goodbye when exams are over and the tuition ends! All of our tutors are university students – young people between the ages of 19 and 25 – this makes it a lot easier for the child to connect to his/her tutor, and to build a genuine rapport and friendship. For many children, their tutor can become another positive role model in their lives, and one who happens to help them with their schoolwork too! Often, this means our students even look forward to their maths lessons! If that is the case, then we know we are doing our jobs correctly. To read more specifically about the benefits of university tutors as maths tutors, read this blog.
So there are my top 5 reasons why you should consider hiring a maths tutor – I hope you have found this helpful.
If you like the sound of it, and would like to book in a free taster session, you can do so here.