Tutoring Is A Form Of Healing

When I work with struggling students, I use the tutorial as a way of healing them from the bruises inflicted in the classroom, from chronic confusion, or from apathy in their independent work.

If a student is having trouble with, say, math, then clearly the work involves increasing his facility with a certain set of formulas or skills—just as tutoring Spanish involves boosting familiarity with conjugations and other linguistic structures.

But the real work of the tutorial goes beneath the surface to the more personal and complex conditions that interfere with the learning process.

Think of a tutor as you would a doctor. Just like a doctor who wants to heal the patient by alleviating a particular condition, so does a tutor hope to “heal” a student from a particular academic symptom.

Doctors are increasingly evaluated on how efficiently they can reach the desired outcome—a healthy person—with as few unnecessary, costly, or painful tests as possible. So it should be with tutors: the tutor’s goal is to tutor herself out of a job. Achieving this does not usually happen after one or two sessions—just as some patients experience chronic symptoms that are not easily alleviated—but it always remains the long-term goal.

The tutor can usually tell the difference between a “major malignancy” and “the common cold,” and she must target her intervention to address the severity of the affliction, setting in motion short- and long-term recoveries. The tutor must also guard against the affliction of “learned helplessness,” in which a student affects to know less than she truly does, in the hopes of maintaining tutoring as an ongoing therapy and not as a precision surgery.

Most important to our analogy is that a doctor has a wide range of tools to combat a particular problem. Some solutions are pharmaceutical, while others are physical, or nutritional. Heart disease and high blood pressure can often be mitigated by losing weight (exercising more and eating healthier foods). In other words, a doctor often prescribes behavioral changes to combat health problems.

Similarly, tutors institute behavioral changes in the student, both in the classroom and at home, to address academic problems. The behavior can be as simple and obvious as “raise your hand more in class to signal to the teacher that you have done the work, are paying attention, and care about sharing your voice.” (Class participation often represents a small but important percentage of a student’s final grade.)

Or the tutor looks at a student’s difficulty with long-term assignments and says, “Let’s plan out this major assignment one week in advance, breaking down an overwhelming task into smaller, daily assignments for which you can be accountable.”

Or: “When you slouch in the chair, you compress your diaphragm and prevent vital oxygen from reaching your brain, without which it’s difficult to think.”

Or: “Let’s get out of the chair altogether and throw a ball back and forth as we brainstorm; activating your body yields more energy and ideas.”

Those are all forms of practical, behavioral advice that can help a student address a particular aspect of academic difficulty and which lead to a stronger, healthier student. They are the equivalent of the physical therapist, who says, “Do this exercise or stretch one time per day in repetitions of 10.” The muscular development resulting from the engagement with the exercise corrects the source of the inflammation/impingement, but must be done consistently in order to feel the maximum benefit.

21st century medical interventions now emphasize preventive care, and it may well be that tutoring can also serve such a preventive function: eliminating an educational problem before it arises. This is an appealing idea for many parents: why wait for the problem to emerge when it can be forestalled with early detection and remediation? A tutor’s insight can be crucial in looking ahead, not just to the next test, but to next year’s learning expectations. If, for example, a student reaches grade-level expectations in addition and subtraction, but isn’t yet facile enough with the mental aspects of the computation or employing a sound strategy for achieving the right answer, then he might struggle when pushed into multiplication and division. Here, the tutor can prevent the future problem by making the necessary adjustments before the issue emerges.

While I accept that tutoring can serve such a preventive purpose, I’m cautious about starting tutoring before it is necessary because it risks prematurely interfering with the student’s self-development. A student struggling to learn a new topic may experience unwanted stress and anxiety, but it’s normal to feel overwhelmed by new material—to be in the “learning pit” and not yet know how to climb out. In those moments, it’s essential that they learn not to run away from those feelings, but to confront and move through them, and in this way normalize the anxiety that is inherently part of not knowing. (The tutor can help guide them through the discomfort of being confused.)

If a child refuses to engage, or can’t find a way to climb out of the pit independently, then the struggle may be too much to confront on his own. But just as a child must build up immunity and not simply take antibiotics for every runny nose, so must the student develop her own defenses and supports to confront academic challenges. Otherwise, the crutches—read: tutoring—used to assist while the bone heals become permanent supports, a problem in and of itself.

The unavoidable truth is that changing behavior takes time; it’s a non-linear, two-steps-forward-one-step-back process. Achieving healthier academic engagement first requires self-awareness of one’s study habits, then promoting/inhibiting those that are helpful/harmful. The “ultimate” healing lies in practicing new and healthy behaviors until they become habitual.

I don’t think very many tutors have gone to Med School, but experienced tutors are certainly more than homework helpers, or last-minute study-buddies. They know how to spot chronic symptoms and intervene on a deeper level, beneath the surface of the academic problem, addressing—and healing—its root causes.