<p>Thanks in advance for reading this long post! Any insights on this situation are welcome.</p>
<p>D (HS soph) is struggling a bit in Math, has an 80 average rather than the high 80s/low 90s that she's had for the past several years. It's Algebra II/Trig and most of the other students are Juniors; none of them are really her friends and she's kind of a shy kid which makes it hard for her to find classmates to study with. She's been going to the teacher for extra help but it doesn't seem to be doing that much for her. What worries me most is that she used to be much more confident in Math but now she seems to have almost given up. We were talking about review and mastery of concepts and she said "I don't think I have mastery of any of the concepts."</p>
<p>So last month we found her a Math tutor. He's an experienced HS teacher who came highly recommended by another Math teacher. She's had 2 sessions with him and the 1st seemed to go well; they identified some bad work habits and issues for her to work on. He's quite expensive but my feeling was that if he could help turn things around and give her some confidence it would be worth it, and after the 1st session he said that he thought she would be fine after just a little more work.</p>
<p>However, today D came home with a 31 out of 40 on a take-home quiz. I asked her what happened and she said she didn't know and then she said "It's not really my fault, I went over it with the tutor and he said it was ok." So I feel like I just threw $$ down the drain. But of course I know that what kids say happened in class or with a teacher is not always what really happened. So for now I told her to bring the take-home quiz to her teacher and make sure she knows what she's doing wrong. </p>
<p>But my real question is, how to talk to the tutor about it--she has a session with him coming up on Thursday afternoon. I feel like saying "I want my money back for that last session" but of course I know that's not fair either. Is it reasonable to show him the take-home quiz and say "What do you think happened here"? I've done tutoring myself and I know that the tutor can't be responsible for grades, especially when it comes to tests and essays, but on the other hand I would have expected that with a take-home math quiz the results would be more straightforward?</p>
<p>I don’t think it is necessarily reasonable to expect 2 sessions to turn things around. The first session was probably a “lets see where you are” type of thing. Talk to the tutor and see what he says and what his approach is. Does he know you are working on short term goals, he might be looking at the bigger picture. If you aren’t confident he can help your daughter turn things around, find someone else.</p>
<p>Does “went over it with the tutor” mean that she actually showed him the take home quiz and they went over the actual quiz together or he at least looked at her work and answers and said it was OK? Or does it mean they covered the subject matter of the quiz in one of their sessions? If the former, I’d really be wondering about either the competence of the tutor or the grading if the math teacher. If the latter, then I think you need to look closely at what she got points off for to see if it was lack of understanding of the main material, not knowing some other material these problems built on, or silly math mistakes. Some of that just can’t be blamed on a tutor who’s had 2 sessions with your D. In any event I’d definitely discuss it with him. Teenagers don’t always give you the whole story.</p>
<p>What mamom said. Two sessions and she’s supposed to be significantly improved? Nope. Now, if she’s taking this already-graded quiz to the tutor and he goes over it with her, what do you want him to say? They “go over” it. There’s nothing to be done about the grade at this point. He reassures her with an “it’s okay.” SHould he have said, “Wow, you really did a lousy job?” </p>
<p>If she took the quiz to him before it was turned in, he’s put in a pretty awkward situation. Too much help, and it’s no longer her work. In that case, maybe “ok” means something like “not stellar, but you’ll pass”.</p>
<p>What, exactly, was the material on the take-home quiz? The school year being 3/4 over, I’m concerned that the ongoing struggle has resulted in a lot of built-up math baggage.</p>
<p>“I went over it with the tutor and he said it was OK.” can mean a lot of different things that range from:</p>
<p>“I talked with my tutor about the general concepts on this homework.”
to
“My tutor sat with me and discussed each of these problems with me as I did them, and I worked through each of the ones that I didn’t understand until I fully understood the material and I was fully confident that the answers were absolutely correct.”</p>
<p>I’d suggest that you have a friendly chat with the tutor about what your daughter’s statement could have meant, how he plans to use the results of this quiz (and future quizzes) in his work with her, and any advice he has for helping you provide a supportive environment within the home for her math learning.</p>
<p>By all means, show the tutor the quiz and ask, “Do you gave any insight into how this happened?”</p>
<p>If I were the teacher, I’d be outraged if a student assumed she could complete a take-home quiz with her tutor. If I were the tutor, I’d be willing to work similar problems with the student, but not the ones in the quiz, unless the teacher had explicitly told me, personally and not via the student, that that was OK.</p>
<p>This has to be frustrating as all get out for you and the tutor (and, I assume, for your daughter). Sorry.</p>
<p>But you are seeing this correctly: you ought to ask the tutor, the tutor can’t guarantee grades, and it may be that your daughter isn’t taking enough away from these sessions to justify paying this tutor’s hourly rate (which, for the person you’ve described, ought to be high). But just two lessons isn’t much basis to judge.</p>
<p>Don’t rule out the possibility that the test was graded wrong.</p>
<p>Also, along the lines of what Sikorsky said, maybe this tutor has scruples and did not actually review the take-home test, or if he did, he truly meant it was just “okay,” as in, it was C grade work.</p>
<p>I’ve gone through this with my daughter in the past and my approach was to take a math book (from AOPS I think) that had a wide variety of problems and we just went through the book together so that I could identify where she had problems. We worked through problems together to brush up on those. This past week, she told me that her professor had only covered about half of the material on their final and that she wanted me to go over the material that wasn’t covered. So I just went through the sections in the book that the professor didn’t cover. She already went through it but I have a way of explaining things that she seems to like. Even if I’ve never seen the material before.</p>
<p>I tutored math (Calc I + II) at BC many years ago and my son tutored for about 5 years in college level math, science and a few other areas. That kind of tutoring is usually to get someone through some homework or to prepare them for an exam or to clear up something simple. It’s hard to do remediation where some foundation is missing in a short tutoring session.</p>
<p>Your approach to hire a tutor to work with your daughter is a good approach but the tendency is to expect immediate results when there may be many issues involved and where it takes some time for a tutor to discover those issues and then work on a plan to fix them. I think that this can be hard for a parent because the money can be significant and there may be time pressure involved. I try to make learning the material the main goal and also try to make things enjoyable. Time pressure makes it harder to achieve those goals.</p>
<p>Your question is WWYD: I’d do the tutoring myself even though the time sink would be difficult - but I wouldn’t have the level of indirection. If it were something that I couldn’t do myself because I wasn’t qualified, then I would find the best expert that I could find and give them lots of room to do their thing.</p>
<p>We have had several math tutors. Genenerally, they met once or twice weekly with the student over the long-term (months to years), and the student has to have initiative to ASK FOR HELP with what they did not understand during class, bring and go over class notes and readings, bring review sheets prior to exams, and to review quizzes. It is a lot of work for the student to get things together for the tutor that are specific for that class.</p>
<p>Perhaps you should meet with tutor and student and discuss what responsibilities child will have in helping the tutor to help her, and the long term plan.</p>
<p>Hi just readying the post and answers and thought I would add my 2 cents.</p>
<p>My S is very good in math but there have been times I have hired a tutor. I was upfront about my expectations with the tutor.</p>
<p>Meaning- the first year we hired a tutor, as was in 9 grade for Algebra 2 - my son like your daughter was getting low 80 grades and we had assumed his grade would have been much higher.
When midterms came around I hired a tutor and told the teacher I was going to…she was very nice and sent home all S’s quizzes and test. The tutor reviewed them all and determined that 80% of the errors were minor or S lost points for not showing his work. S got the majority of the concepts and he viewed my son as a talented mathmatician. I hired the same tutor to review for the final as well. S had one of the highest grades on the final.
Last year, I hired him again( I should add that he is a retired math teacher). More of the same but mostly it was because this “new” math teacher was ridiculous about showing work.
Every single step …she was also a ridiculous maker- the final straw was a project he had done that she scored extremely low (D). I showed my son’s work to the tutor and he saw nothing wrong with how my approached the project - it was unique but he got the correct answer- I complained to the principal and GC office and had him switch to another math teacher. He ended the year with a 93. This year he has a 94 avg and no math tutor!</p>
<p>The reason why I am mentioning our experience to let you know that it may be the teacher and not your daughter’s lack of understanding. My advice is to gather up past quizzes and test and have the tutor review them including the latest take home quiz. Ask him what he thinks. Next year make sure she has a math teacher with a good reputation.</p>
<p>You can get a right answer for the wrong reason. You can also be wrong because of a trivial error.</p>
<p>Math practitioners at all levels need to show their work. They don’t need to show it all in such painstaking detail as Algebra I students do, but they need to show work, because work is the written record of their thinking. Teachers need to be able to recover and assess their students’ thinking, not just their answers. And when Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem (using math that I can’t follow and Fermat himself never knew), he needed to record his work so that mathematicians who could follow it, could critique and verify it.</p>
<p>Crepes: a couple of months into the year, we went the same route and found a tutor for my son, who was getting solid Bs even though he felt he was working as hard as he could; like you, I was afraid that he would become discouraged and think he just “wasn’t good at math,” as I did many years ago. So we found a tutor, one with lots of experience, and it did take a while for his grades to respond–I also thought perhaps this wasn’t working–but he’s doing much better now. I think tutoring is a relationship that needs to be developed, and it’s not a question of overnight improvement, but of filling in the gaps, either of knowledge or of technique. He is still going every week, and his grades are now consistently low-to-mid-90s (he got a hundred yesterday! And he was very happy, which is really the point). I didn’t expect him to still be seeing the tutor, but I think it is well worth the investment.</p>
<p>That said, you might want to ask your daughter how well she understands the tutor; as in any relationship, sometimes they just don’t work well together. If she feels that the tutor doesn’t “get” her, you might ask her if she wants to try someone else.</p>
<p>As for the issue of “showing your work”: it can be really difficult for a kid who understands the concepts intuitively to “show” a thought process that she honestly didn’t go through step by step. I’m not saying that the teacher isn’t correct in asking for the work to be shown, but that for students like my daughter it is really a struggle to do math that way; it slows you down. Once she got into the higher level courses, she was much better off. From the teaching point of view, of course, Sikorsky is right–how can you help a student if you can’t see where she went wrong? But for those students who just get it right, it’s like swimming in molasses.</p>