<p>Our son works in the tutoring services department at his school and he sees requests for private tutors for university and high-school students. There have been a fair number of requests in the past two weeks as this is the time where high-school parents find that their child is having problems and want to deal with them as soon as possible.</p>
<p>I see no problem with having tutors. I think that the history of education shows that the wealthy had private tutors in their homes before common schools came about. The tutor does not have to be a crutch - they can teach by asking questions as parents do when their children are young.</p>
<p>Even Roger Federer, former world number one tennis player and currently acknowledged as the greatest player of all time, now has a tutor.</p>
<p>I used to agonize typing a term paper, because of my dyslexia and constant revisions. My first manual typewriter cost $150 (smith corona) in 1964, my earnings from working in the berry and bean fields. My electric typewriter (Olivetti) in 1969 cost $400 again from agriculture labor. I bought this 2000 Toshiba Satellite for $25 and spent another $125 to get the wifi to work and virus protection. Use OpenOffice and a used HP inkjet printer for $10. </p>
<p>Research in library was a huge time chunk also being a distraction because of the other interesting books and magazines. </p>
<p>Steve Jobs made life faster for kids and unless they can channel their energies, they get into trouble. Better to get tutors as the pseudo babysitter.</p>
<p>We did not use a tutor. DS did have private music instrument lessons.
He was a NMF and got into engineering schools. He did have mentors and coaches in the various clubs.</p>
<p>I had many parents ask me where we sent our older son for math tutoring and SAT prep, and were stunned when I told then he had never taken the SAT until March of junior year. “But didn’t you want him to make SET or go to CTY?” Ummm…he didn’t need the external validation? </p>
<p>He learned to teach himself back when he was a wee lad. Still does it, though it has sometimes come back to bite him in the tail now that the work is truly difficult and may require a visit to the prof or TA. Many thanks to the third grade teacher who refused to give him appropriate work – she has no idea how her behavior motivated my kid to challenge himself.</p>
<p>The top students at my high school were just smart and hardworking… Just our backwards Michigan way. </p>
<p>A lot of kids at my high school had two parents with PHDs, so I think genetics has a role to play into why intelligence would outweigh tutoring here.</p>
<p>Around here most kids in middle school spend Saturday mornings in cram school. By high school, they graduate to individual tutors for pretty much every class.</p>
<p>I recently started taking my D for tutoring services. The tutoring place is in a more ritzy area of town, so most of the clients are private-school kids.</p>
<p>The tutoring has been GREAT–helping her regain her slipping confidence in math. But it had never occurred to me to get her a tutor for anything, or her older sis either–both have always been mostly all A students. </p>
<p>The interesting thing is, the kids at this place don’t seem to be behind academically from what I have gathered in the waiting room. They are all there getting test prep to try to ace the SATs, or (the younger ones) test prep to ace the competitive private high-school entrance exams. It’s just interesting…it never occurred to me to have my older D take the SATs more than once, even though there was room for improvement on math side (other side–really high–she was happy w/ scores, so I figured, why push?). </p>
<p>I guess I always thought tutoring was for kids who were really struggling, but after seeing my younger D really ‘get’ the math and start getting A’s again, start ENJOYING it a little even–I realize it is more like music lessons. Someone to help you work on your weak spots and polish your skills.</p>
<p>I think tutoring is a good thing, overall. But I do worry about those stressed-out looking 8th grade boys I see who are test-prepping so hard to get into HS! I think kids need a balance. And the message that you have to be perfect at everything can be destructive.</p>
<p>At our high school, the math teachers had a list of private tutors they handed out at back to school night. I should point out that there was an after school math lab every day after school until 7 PM (teachers each took one day a week), teachers were always available in their classrooms before school and at lunch, and multiple teachers held weekend tutoring sessions prior to AP exams - but parents still wanted tutors - so the teachers handed out the list. </p>
<p>My DS used one of them when he missed nearly a month of school with an injury and had to catch up in a hurry. Seemed like a logical time to use one as he was past the point where I could help.</p>
<p>I think you are looking at this the wrong way. There are “math camps” or summer classes (e.g., CTY) which a lot of kids do. However, I’d say most people want to do this because they want to go above and beyond what is taught in class. That’s why I went to CTY–because I wanted to learn and because basically I wasn’t learning anything in public school. I don’t think top students getting private tutoring for AP classes is common at all. Never heard of it, actually. If they need tutoring for something as easy as a high school class, they’re going to get smoked academically by people who need no such help. And there are plenty.</p>
<p>Sure, there may be some people who are forced but these people are rarely the highest performing people. It’s too hard to be good at something you don’t have a passion for.</p>
<p>Tutoring for advancement and to ensure A’s is extremely common here. In elementary school, kids go to Kumon during the school year and in the summer too, and we also have a very busy learning center in town which offers tutoring, summer enrichment classes, and accredited high school courses like biology and algebra. The center is so successful they now rent half the high school in the summer, in addition to filling their own facility. Kids will take summer classes to move up in level, or to be pre-taught so they can guarantee themselves A’s and/or give themselves a gut class in order to allow them more time to focus on their other classes.</p>
<p>We knew many kids were being tutored, but it wasn’t until my D was doing poorly in AP Chem that I realized how ubiquitous it was. We called the center to inquire about private tutoring for that class. The cost was almost $100/ hr., so we weren’t able to afford it and D just slugged through with the help of 2 or 3 sessions with a college student. However, we did learn from the learning center employee the almost everyone in D’s class was getting tutored by them since the very beginning of the year.</p>
<p>My completely untutored kids had to work harder to figure things out on their own, and were sometimes frustrated when kids in the class would always already know everything when it hadn’t been taught yet. Regardless, they did manage to “compete” with the tutored kids and get into top schools. However, I think they were both very smart. With tutoring, they may have been able to achieve higher class rank or even val or sal status.</p>
<p>I see a lot of negatives with this. Obviously, this is creating an educational elite which correlates very directly to socio-economic status and not necessarily intelligence or diligence. That has already happened in our town. Secondly, this phenomenon takes lazy teachers off the hook and creates lazy teachers where there weren’t before. They now don’t have to work hard to teach their subject well, and nor do they need to concern themselves with kids who aren’t catching on. They just tell them to get tutors, and they assume most parents can afford it. Also, when the teacher senses that many students in the class already know a lot of the material (because they took the class in the summer), they tend to speed up the pace or skip a lot of basic material. The poor kids who are taking the class for the first time or who don’t have tutors to fill in the gaps are really screwed. This happened to my kids a lot. I am proud that they did well anyway. But the fact that there are almost exclusively Asian kids in the honors and AP classes at our school is due to tutoring. Other kids are just as smart and hardworking too, but didn’t have the advantage of being pre-taught material on placement tests, etc.</p>
<p>That’s really depressing, GFG. So pretty much everyone in AP Chem had already taken AP Chem by private tutor, just so they could sit through it again and pretend they were smart? Did these students all have to take honors chemistry before AP chem, too? How many times can you repeat the same material before being bored to death?</p>
<p>I don’t see how these kids will make it through college. Via the eight year program – audit the class once then take it officially? I hate to think that many of these kids will be finishing med school just in time to take care of us in our old age!</p>
<p>I have a slightly different take on this. As a home schooled student, my daughter was, for all intents and purposes, tutored in every subject. She also excelled in every subject, as do many academically adept home schooled students. Nothing beats a really good, individualized academic program taught one-on-one. Like home school parents, parents who hire tutors for their conventionally schooled children are taking responsibility for their children’s educations, individualizing their academic programs, and giving them access to one-on-one teaching. You could say it’s the best of both worlds. (You could also say it’s an inefficient way of home schooling.). Of course, my comments fail to address the various motives for hiring tutors (some are better than others) or the problems encountered by families that can’t afford private tutors, and the relative fairness or unfairness of that.</p>
<p>I know we are in one of these competitive, public school districts but we also have lots of low income kids without a lot of financial or academic support at home. About 35% get free/reduced fee lunches. </p>
<p>Our public HS has 0 period before school starts for kids who are struggling to come in for an extra hour in the courses that they need a boost. There is always a teacher available for every subject during every lunch period (they rotate and it is part of each teacher’s responsibilities). My D frequently goes to school early or during lunch to ask questions and tackle assignments that she is having having trouble completing. During the fall, in anticipation of the science fair which is required for 10th graders, there is always one science teacher available all day saturday. Before the AP/IB and state exam season there are tutoring sessions offered by the teachers and student peers in the morning, evenings and weekends. If someone is paying for private tutoring, either their kid needs some intensive one on one or the parents are nuts! We have some of the best and most dedicated teachers I have ever seen and I think we get a bargain for our tax dollars. The only tutoring I have paid for was an SAT class for my S. However, I discovered after I had paid that big fee that the school offered an SAT tutoring class at the end of Junior year that was subsidized by the county, free for low income kids and was at the school on tuesday and thursday afternoons so kids could get late buses home. I wish all counties/cities had this type of support for all the kids.</p>
<p>fineartsmajormom - We’re a small school district (one elementary, one middle, one high school) but we also offer “helping period” after school, before the buses come, for about 40 minutes. All teachers are present, no after school clubs or sports can meet during this time. It truly is a very important part of our school, very helpful to our students. The PTSA offers SAT classes for a greatly reduced cost which can be further reduced for financial hardship. I don’t know why more districts don’t offer these things.</p>
<p>I personally hate the tutor the smart kid attitude because 97 isn’t “good enough” for my kid.</p>
<p>fineartsmajormom, that sounds like a great system of support and teacher availability. When we were trying to decide about our local public HS (one of the best in our state), we took a tour. The tutoring center at the local public HS is staffed by students, not teachers, who get community service hours for volunteering. There are no regular office hours for the teachers. The APUSH class that year had 46 students in the class, 6 more students than there were desks in the room, so the extra kids sat on the floor for several weeks until enough students dropped the class and there were desks for everybody.
We opted not to send our daughter to the school, but I can understand why many families “tutor up” from the beginning to ensure that their kids stay competitive.</p>
<p>Our area has a magnet high school. Starting in the 5th grade, many of D2’s classmates had tutors to prepare them for the entrance exam and to make sure they kept their grades up. D2’s attitude was consistent with yours: “If I need test prep to get in, I don’t want to attend.” </p>
<p>Many of her classmates are under intense pressure from their parents to get into MIT, CalTech or one of the Ivys, but many will get a rude awakening. Despite how hard it is to get into this high school and how hard these kids work while there, 30% of them will not even be accepted by our state flagship university.</p>
<p>These bright kids aren’t being spoon-fed in their tutoring sessions. They are shown different and sometime faster ways of problem solving. They are taught more advanced material that makes their school work look trivially easy. They are being led to and challenged at a higher level by their (good) tutors.</p>
<p>Well said. When people attacked the SAT as having high SES correlation, I wondered why they didn’t mention GPA also. Is it because it would open a nasty can of worms?</p>
<p>Even with natural ability and passion, these bright kids still may need outside training to differentiate themselves from other equally bright kids. The six kids in the US Olympiad team are arguably the best and the brightest math kids in the country, and yet they are subjected to month long intensive training on high school (albeit competition level) pre-calc math before they compete internationally.</p>
<p>Thanks to all who posted! Based on what we have so far, it seems this tutoring phenomenon is mostly on both coasts. I suspect there are pockets in other regions that are also experiencing this. I have no doubt that there are still good school districts where tutoring for high achievers is rare or non-existent; however, before I looked into this in our school, I didn’t know how prevalent tutoring is either. For those parents who posted that they’ve never seen this in their district, I’d suggest you look into this deeper. Some of you may be in for a big surprise.</p>
<p>Except for a few posts, my OP questions remain for the most part unanswered.</p>
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<p>Here are some of the answers on this thread.</p>
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<p>Why and how is the school harder than say 20 years ago?</p>
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<p>Is this “teachers don’t teach” a recent thing? If so, what triggered this?</p>
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<p>This may be the reason that turned some kids to tutoring, but it does not explain why tutoring is a relative recent phenomenon? We’ve had AP’s for decades.</p>
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<p>This may be close to a cause. When did elite colleges start to insist on the “most rigorous curriculum” box being checked? For that matter, when did that box appear for the first time?</p>
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<p>I guess this is so they can be competitive for elite college admissions. Again, when did getting into elite colleges requiring a near perfect GPA? If this is a recent development, than we may have a cause here.</p>
<p><a href=“3”>quote</a> for students already excelling, but want to differentiate themselves from close competitors, with better writing performance, testing skills, and higher-level reading skills. These families are going for enrichment reasons, but finding that enrichment “essential” for reach publics and for competitive privates.
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<p>This may be it. But why does this happen just recently? Is it possible that it didn’t use to require a near perfect GPA in an all honor/AP curriculum for unhooked kids to get into the now “reach publics and for competitive privates”? If so, we are in a vicious cycle. Which came first? Did the students become more competitive first or did the colleges become more selective first?</p>
<p>PCP, Interesting points. I think SAT tutoring started in a similar vein. There used to be no tutoring for SATs. Kids started to game it and got 2400. Colleges had to counter now putting greater weight on GPAs. Tutoring spreads to indivisual courses, and so on. Unless it proves fruitless, it isn’t going to stop. Becoming a medical doctor or a lawyer probably doesn’t take a lot of creativity that may be hampered by excessive tutoring. As far as those professions pay well, what is going to stop tutoring?</p>