Tutoring

 

Docendo discimus.
--Seneca

"While we teach, we learn."  So true.  And that's the reason I'd like to be a tutor.

One of the most interesting courses I took as an undergraduate, and the one undergraduate course that has probably had the most lasting impact on me, was a mandatory freshman course -- History of Western Civilization.  As the name suggests, the course covered the entire period from earliest historic times up until, approximately, the early twentieth century.

It was a full year, four credit course -- one day per week was devoted to a lecture by specialist on some aspect of the period then being covered, a lecture attended by the entire freshman class.  Three days a week were devoted to small discussion groups.  Participation in group discussions contributed to forty percent of the grade, which -- together with the desire not to be considered an idiot by your peers -- inclined us all to do the assigned readings.

Our readings were drawn from four course books, plus readings available only for two-hour check-outs from the "Western Civ Reading Room."  The course books -- titles printed here just because I spent some time searching for them -- were (1) a standard college text, Burns, Western Civilizations; (2) Knoles & Snyder, Readings in Western Civilization; (3) Columbia University, Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West; and (4)  a standard art history book.

That was a lot of reading for a four credit course.  By the time I had finished college, one of my peers was an entrepreneur who saw a way to make money off freshman insecurities.  He hired someone to prepare a summary of the salient points in the Burns text, and hired me to summarize, and describe the significance of, each of the readings assigned from items (2) and (3) above.

The job sounded interesting, and so I agreed to do it.  I ended up spending most of my Christmas vacation re-reading all the assigned readings I had once read as a freshman, and then writing a few paragraphs about each, enough to enable the purchaser to keep his head above water in a group discussion.  I had, and still have, some qualms about the ethics of both preparing and using such a crib, but it was sold -- as I recall -- through the university's on-campus bookstore, so I suppose I tend to be overly fussy.  Possibly, buyers used it merely to help prepare for final exams, reminding themselves of what they had once read fully and in careful detail.

Yup.

But my point, for purposes of this essay, is that the time I spent writing those summaries was extraordinarily useful in recalling what I had read as a freshman and fixing it more or less permanently in my long-term memory.  Also, after four years as a history major, I was able to read those assignments in a context that I simply didn't have as a kid just out of high school.

And that's why I'd like to tutor.  Virtually any subject that I've ever studied.  Just to remind myself of facts I once knew and had forgotten, and to appreciate what I had earlier studied in light of the experiences of my life to date.

I've had only one experience as a tutor.  A neighbor once asked me to tutor her son in his high school math class.  He was a nice kid, and we got along well.  We went over his homework each session, and I took him through it step by step.  I was pleased that he seemed to understand what he was doing.

He flunked the course.  It wasn't easy to fail a course at my high school.  I didn't want to keep the money his mother had paid me, but she felt that I deserved it for my time and effort.  If I ever tutor again -- unlikely, I suspect -- I would re-think my approach to teaching.  I would consider the difference between teaching and -- in effect -- doing the student's homework for him.

And I confess -- ideally, I'd be tutoring a kid with an IQ of 160 who wanted help raising his grade from an A to an A+.