All About Finding & Evaluating Tutors

[Mdm Koh]

shern25:

How would u assess a tutor who have no problem with the student and parents for 6 months of tutoring but ended the student still fail in his final year exam? The student and the parents find the tutor ok with the way he teach before the exam. He has given practices and homeworks to the student. The student is highly motivated and have greater interest in the subject due to the tutor's influence. The tutor cleared many misconceptions in the subject and student learned many things from the tutor. The student has put in lots of effort to practice exam questions. But the end result....he failed. Everyone was shocked. After looking through his exam paper, the cause of his fail is he's still not able to solve new questions despite many hours of practices on past exam questions. So even with 6 months of tuitions he has not even improved to a C or B. What has gone wrong? The parents felt the money wasted. The student felt he must be very stupid. The tutor is simply devastated that he has failed despite the parents find nothing wrong with him to sack him earlier to get other tutor. Any parents or tutors having similar experience? The student is JC2 physics.

There are many possibilities, such as the paper could be too difficult (above 'A' level standard) or the student still lacks conceptual understanding so he is not able to apply what the tutor has taught to different types of questions, etc.

If you are worried about whether the tutor is adequate, I suggest seeking an another opinion from someone whom you trust. It could be another 'A' level grad, the school teacher or another science subject tutor. If you intend to do this, however, you should bring along the Physics tutor's notes and practices so that they can have an accurate gauge of the tutor's abilities.

Bringing along the tutor's notes will be more fair for the tutor, because if you just ask anyone offhand why your child failed despite tuition, most people will probably say that maybe the tuition was ineffective. But there could be other reasons. Hope you resolve the issue soon and help your child regain confidence in the subject.

[unbelieveably_kiasu]

A good and responsible tutor is one who wants and willing to stay on with the child till end of year and not leaving him/her in the lurch by giving some excuses like schedule limitations and unable to continue teaching before the year end exam comes but subsequently finding other students to start group tuition. Yes group tuition earns you more income than one to one teaching but we are not paying you any lesser at $500 per month for 4 lessons 2 hours weekly! Looks like dollar and cent matters most to this tutor and not the responsibility. If you can’t commit then don’t teach in the first place. This is definitely not passion for teaching. Just trying to make more money out of the demand for tuitions in Singapore.

[raisintan]

Hi,


I just posted this query under the Chinese thread. Am posting here, hoping to gather more response from experienced parents.

I recently got a Chinese tutor and her rate is expensive in my opinion. We just started a few lessons with her and I noted that she marks my child’s compo and work done during tuition lesson, while my child will be doing new written work assigned by her.

As this is my 1st time engaging a tutor, I just want to have an idea if it’s reasonable to allow her to use the tuition time for marking. She does engage my child and explain to her after marking, going through the corrections or what is expected and the techniques etc. Homework is given, which she’ll mark during next lesson

[Gen iY mom]

Wow… read through all 29 pages… and learned a lot. Will share my experience after finish cooking.

[Gen iY mom]

janet_lee88:

1) 1-1 tuition

2) 2 years
3) $50 for 2 hours every sat
4) end result...F.

i must have been either 1) stressed 2) blind not to realize something is wrong.

my daughter dislikes chinese...so i plan to coach her myself for the next 3 months. P-U-S-H.

Hi Janet_lee88,

I completely understand your situation. We too, fell into this. We hired this ex-tuition centre (a famous math center) tutor. She quit the center and struck out on her own shortly after we put DD in the centre. Tutor seem pleasant enough, bubbly and able to click with DD. So since DD has been with her in the centre, we continued with her when she went solo.

Continuing into P6... it was $60 per hr 1-to-1. Each week 2 hrs. Results? Only marginal improvement for our DD for her SA1, tests and Prelims. We thought it's DD's fault. She isn't the easiest girl to teach. Understand today, everything forgotten tomorrow...those type. I know, coz previously I tried teaching her myself, but all I got was :stupid: :slapshead: . Sigh.

But we persevered with the tutor despite the warning signs... closer to PSLE..around middle of this year, all we hear was the tutor's lecturing and scolding during every lesson. Half of me wanted to sack her...but the other half wanted to carry on. Yeah... looking back I'm :siao: But at that time, I was at a lost. I don't have time to look for another tutor.

To cut long story short.... my DD Math PSLE got 'D'. The tutor didn't even bother to sms me to ask how did DD do. (In contrast, DD's other tutors for Chinese and Eng sms'd me... incidentally DD had A's for the languages. Cynical me wonder if tutors already have insight how their tuitees will perform in the national exam?).

On hindsight (which is always perfect), we should have sack this Math tutor earlier.... :mad:

Like you, my DD hate the subject she's being tutored. In her case, it's Math. One main reason why we put our dear children through tuition is to overcome the hate/fear of the subject.

Am currently on the lookout for recommendations for tutors for Math who can teach Sec 1 Normal Acad, preferably female, in the North... anyone who knows such tutors, who can take up the challenge of removing Math fear in my girl...pls pls pm me?

Sorry for the long-winded post...just need to get this out of my system.

Thx

[jedamum]

Raisin tan

Our ex chinese tutor will mark and go through the compo line by line with my kid. She will also read and do compre with him.he will not be spending tuition time to do his homework as those will be done after lesson and marked together with kid and explaining.

Our math tutor will at times require kid to do some sums on the spot to assess his thought process. Only when I instruct that I don’t want homework because too near to exams,that she will sit with the kid to mark as he did the paper as a form of final revision.

[raisintan]

jedamum:

Raisin tan

Our ex chinese tutor will mark and go through the compo line by line with my kid. She will also read and do compre with him.he will not be spending tuition time to do his homework as those will be done after lesson and marked together with kid and explaining.

Our math tutor will at times require kid to do some sums on the spot to assess his thought process. Only when I instruct that I don't want homework because too near to exams,that she will sit with the kid to mark as he did the paper as a form of final revision.

Hi jedamum,

Thanks for responding. So, it seems tutors are marking work during tuition lessons. I was thinking it'll be more cost effective for parents if tutors are marking work at home and tuition time can be more well spent on going through work/ corrections with our kids

[jedamum]

Raisin tan

I understand your concerns as the time spent should be better left to do explanation since we are paying so much.
For us, we are ok that the chinese teacher mark the compo and compre there as she needed to go through with the kid. But we established an understanding that I will mark the mcq section and she only need to go through the wrong ones.

I offer the same for math. The math teacher prefer to do her own marking as she knows the answer because she has a few same level students doing similar paper.since she is only half the price of the chinese tutor,I obliged.

[obiwanmum]

Do you all typically conduct face to face interview of the tutor before hiring him/her?


How about asking for a trial lesson to see your DC click with tutor or not?

[sallytan20011]

Actually sometimes this kind of things cannot control one. The same tutor taught my boy and my friend’s daughter and my boy grades like improve a bit only but my friends daughter get A. They both P5 going P6 next year. Maybe coz my friend’s daughter had tuition for a longer time but my point is this kind of thing hard to control.