Tutoring is a Creative Process

When contemplating questions of intelligence, the language of learning is too easily reduced to unhelpful binaries (good/bad, right/wrong, pass/fail, smart/stupid). Such labels obscure the many and varied dynamics of how we learn, a process necessarily filled with false starts, wrong turns, inklings, and uncertainty—all valuable because they reveal the ways in which new information becomes caught in the web of an individual’s ability and experience.

In their role as critical evaluators, teachers can offer insight into and commentary about the rich and dynamic processes that go into producing the final graded result—though most students only look at the letter grade and move on. (On report cards, there is usually a subjective judgement about a student’s “effort,” but it doesn’t get at the totality of the student’s engagement.) Tutors, however, avoiding grades and scores, keep focused on the process of engaging and stay open to a more wide-ranging exchange of ideas, which they can validate, even if they don’t end up useful for what eventually gets handed in. To borrow from Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story, “Sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly.”

What we call “academics” is actually a cipher for many interconnected forms of knowledge that we access and experience in different ways (cognitive, neuropsychological, behavioral, socio-emotional). But it is a mistake to reduce academic engagement to intellect alone.

I don’t see tutoring as primarily an intellectual experience (though clearly the work involves the use of one’s intellect) and I don’t see the success of tutoring as being purely—or even mainly—academic. Rather, I seek to reframe supposed academic struggles as creative ones. In contrast to the unhelpful binaries of an intellectual process, a creative process opens up a learning territory that is more responsive to the individual, more personal, and more open-ended, leading to greater possibility and more dynamism.

I’m not the first person wanting to amplify creativity in an educational process. Educator Sir Ken Robinson has written extensively about creativity and how it is squeezed out of children as they are taught to meet the requirements of standardized curriculums and tests. (Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” from 2006 is, as of this writing, the most watched TED Talk of all time.) In Out of Our Minds: The Power of Being Creative, he describes how the foundations of our current educational system were designed in the late 1800s during the Industrial Revolution and that school is currently shaped by the standards of college and university professors to remake kids in their images—from the neck up. Over time, a K-12 education eliminates the body from the process, leaving within each student a picture of himself as a disembodied head, and it ignores that there are different kinds of intelligences and different ways to engage the self. This educational system predominates today, despite the fact that we all have no idea what skills will truly be necessary in ten or twenty years when these schoolchildren begin their careers.

The children Robinson describes are the very ones that tutors like me end up working with, and I can see how they are all smart, overworked, and stressed out, how they have lost touch with their own interests, passions, and curiosities. Most want good grades, but they don’t think about how what they are learning is shaping them. They are on the conveyor belt from kindergarten to college. Many of them get straight As, yet always feel as if they’re failing. Receiving a B on a quiz isn’t easily shrugged off or contextualized as “I had a bad day.” Rather, it becomes a serious issue that needs to be addressed. Others are so overwhelmed by the administrative bureaucracy of “doing school” or by the fast pace of assignments that they can never establish a foothold against the tide of work.

All of this makes tutoring, by necessity, much less about “academics” and much more about rehabilitating an approach to learning that has more oxygen and possibility, welcoming all of the student’s own impulses, interests, and strengths—especially those strengths that receive no validation from the teacher and about which the student himself may be unaware.

What I try to do is holistic: I approach a particular topic or discipline from the student’s natural inclinations or place of strength, then encourage her to go further, gently challenging or bringing her back if she goes too far off track. This means that different kinds of learners—visual, auditory, kinesthetic—are allowed to be themselves and we work together to cross-pollinate learning approaches that engage the student’s own systems, not only the cognitive ones. For students who manifest little energy toward their studies, it becomes my job to discover how to make what they are doing meaningful, to value and honor their own process of engagement, to see the subject through their eyes and to find a way to get them hooked. (It’s good to note that I don’t always like what hooks them, but I recognize that they have found their way in, which is the goal.)

The divisions in the brain are nothing like the academic distinctions we ascribe to math, English, or writing. A child’s struggle in one particular subject may well be connected to other areas in dynamic ways. An example: a student struggling in Latin happened to be very interested in computer coding, and, during one of our sessions, she remarked that the way Latin stores necessary information in its inflected endings (for nouns, verbs, and adjectives) was similar to computer code, which itself is a kind of language that prizes economy and shortcuts. The word syntax—important to both Latin and coding—was the bridge. I had never thought of Latin that way before, but for her, it was a way in. Her own way in.

Other students who excel in music have had strong connections to the musicality of Latin, particularly when they are taught about the dactylic hexameter meter of epic verse. The “beat” of the language makes the experience musical/auditory, instead of visual/literary. I have tried to get other students to sing the text in order to hear the sounds—only to find that they find that approach uncomfortable. It’s never one-size-fits-all.

One of my own ways into Latin was through my affinity for crossword puzzles: I found myself visualizing letters and building letter combinations in my mind in order to fill blank squares and complete the puzzle. That process was all I needed to enjoy working through the possibilities for declension and conjugation endings that are crucial to translating Latin.

The above are all examples of idiosyncratic, holistic ways of learning Latin that textbooks and classrooms don’t address.

By approaching the student holistically, by encouraging her to creatively personalize her engagement with her coursework—which, by the way, includes hating what she’s doing and being frustrated and confused—the tutor makes possible a learning process that is healthy and enriched. It usually doesn’t take long for something to click and for the student to say, “Oh, I see that. I didn’t get that before.” Those “aha” moments are something to be celebrated. They’re the beginning of a new kind of student who has found that the ideas and skills already live within her, waiting to be discovered and activated.