Articles

• Social Networking
• Interview Tips
• Position Yourself
• Ten Things Before You Apply

Typical Day Series

• Law School Librarian
• College Professor
• Head Start Teacher
• First Grade Teacher
• Bank Employee
• General Contractor
• Grade School Principal
• Court Reporter
• Grief Counselor
• Kindergarten Teacher
• Direct Support Professional
• Salesman
• Building Inspector
• Dispensing Optician
• Medical Biller
• Tutor
• Merchandiser
• Theatre Teacher
• Waiter
• Paralegal
• Real Estate Agent
• Teacher
• CLE Administrator
• Third Grade Teacher
• Sales Interview Tips
• Pepsi Jobs: Truck Driving
• Software Solution Architect
• Recovery Room Aide
 

Tutor Jobs

Inside the Work Day

Careerleak's Typical Day Series goes behind the scenes in everyday careers, with articles written by the employee themselves. Find out what they are excited about, what issues they confront and more. CareerLeak is Career Information.

A Typical Day as a Tutor

I tutor elementary school students in math. During the school year, this means that students come (or more likely are referred by their teachers) to me if they are having trouble. Generally I have the summers to myself.

The subjects range from basic addition up through fractions. A tutor is not a teacher, so although I keep items such as flashcards, pencils, paper, etc. on hand, I do not assign homework or keep grades.

I’m generally eager to get to work in the morning, and my day starts with students trickling in one by one. The younger ones, ages five to seven, usually come first because first and second graders normally do math before recess. We have ‘games’ that help with skills like telling time and counting money since half of the battle at that age is keeping them engaged long enough to learn something.

The oldest students, ten to twelve, come in when the younger ones leave for lunch, and with them my job usually involves giving more in-depth explanations than the teachers have time for. Visual cues are also helpful. For example, explaining fractions in terms of water left in a glass or division in terms of apple slices. These students tend to work together fairly well which makes larger projects like encouraging them to make a set of posters to explain a concept particularly effective.

The hardest students to deal with are the ones that come in last. These tend to be the ones who are in-between; around ages eight and nine they’ve finished with the basics but haven’t moved on to more advanced topics and are working on by-rote subjects. The multiplication tables are one of my personal nightmares since there comes a point where there’s nothing that can help the students but straight memorization. There are very few ways to make memorization ‘fun’ short of the races and timed tests the teachers use in classes, and by the time they come to me the students are usually so fed up with coming in last that they don’t even want to try.

This is also the age when students seem to start really ranking themselves against their peers so I also don’t want to reinforce the ‘last’ concept with the students struggling the hardest. Working individually seems to be the most useful here since no matter how difficult a time a particular student might be having I can find something positive to reinforce, even if it is only the determination to learn.

Tutoring can occasionally get frustrating since it involves working with students who are having a hard time and have occasionally ‘given up’ or are convinced math is evil and they’ll never have any use for it. On the other hand, it’s wonderful to see the light go on—and despite what people may say, this is something that you definitely can see—when they understand a concept that they just could not grasp previously.

I’ve thought about switching to teaching full-time, but I like what I do and prefer the more one-on-one time I can get with these students over trying to manage a full classroom all the time and having to teach to the majority. One thing I would like to do, and it’s something that has come up in the past, is make an option for students who are moving more quickly in classes to come down as well so they could have one-on-one help with more advanced topics that their classmates just aren’t ready for. So far nothing has come of this, but I have hopes for the future.