In fact, most of the “tutoring” centres you know don’t actually help your child with his school work at all. Most of the well-known educational franchises use their own curriculum and teach their own lessons. These lessons may or may not relate to your child’s school work.
There are two main ways of approaching school problems: remediation and reinforcement.
Remediation is often described as going back to the student’s “level” and then re-teaching the basics. This is the method most often used by large, commercial centres who have their own curriculum and their own ways of teaching. People who promote this form of tutoring believe that a child needs to learn specific skills in a specific order in order to ever really “get” math. They offer programs that are completely separate from what the student is doing in school. In fact, they are almost always teaching skills far behind the child’s own school work because they are “going back to basics.”
Reinforcement is often described as “supportive” tutoring: tutoring that specifically targets what a student is doing right now in school. This method is most often used by smaller tutoring centres such as ours or by independent tutors. Those of us who promote this type of tutoring believe that even students with a weaker foundation can be supported and quickly brought up to their current grade level by strategic remediation, that is, going back and picking up only the specific pieces you need when you need them. They offer an opportunity for the student to translate tutoring into immediate school-related results. For example, after just one reinforcement lesson, a student should be able to complete his current day’s homework.
Ironically, most parents looking for help with schoolwork end up calling a “big name” place first, but these are precisely the people who do not offer that type of tutoring. They then find themselves trapped in restrictive, pre-paid remedial programs when they really need a reinforcement strategy. This is because remedial centres are so well known that parents call them first, even when what they are really looking for a reinforcement tutor.Reinforcement tutoring cannot be standardized because every lesson is different. That’s why it’s so important to know the difference, and to know which one you need before you call a company.
Remediation tends to work well either for younger students (grade 6 and below) or for students who don’t need to worry about keeping up in school. Remediation works best when the child can focus on the remediation curriculum and doesn’t have to also juggle a separate, unrelated school curriculum. So, remediation can work if you have an agreement with your child’s teacher that your child is getting support elsewhere, if your child is home schooled, or if your child is not currently enrolled in math.
Reinforcement is almost always the best selection for struggling junior high or high school students who are best served by a program that helps them with their daily school work. At this older age, students are very sensitive to their performance in class and it is important to help them be successful in this environment. Students who struggle in high school are often pretty frustrated by their school work and are not really eager to take on a second, remedial math curriculum as well. This is why we suggest reinforcement tutoring for Grades 7 and up. This way, the work done with a tutor directly relates to (or “shadows”) their own school curriculum and works to bring them up to that current level as quickly as possible.