What you need to know...

Most parents are busy. You work hard all day, juggling professional obligations, family concerns, social commitments, and maybe even some time for fun when you can. Often, when you ask about your teenager's day, you hear the wonderfully descriptive response of, "It was fine." As a result, parents, students and teachers generally communicate through grades. The grade is the stamp of your student's achievement. What you need to know is that a grade is a lagging indicator of student progress. A student's grade in October is not a reflection of what she is doing in October; it is a sign of what she did in September. Why this is important to bring up is that direct tutoring will move grades upward, but it will not be instantaneous. I have never failed to help a student make progress if the student remains committed to the process and I hope to help your student as well.

"Sounds reasonable. How long until we see results?"

Ideally, immediately. The question is more what kind of results will you see. In the first handful of weeks, I have generally been able to help a student clarify and build confidence. Clarifying comes in two parts: there are in-the-moment technical adjustments to improve accuracy on tasks (e.g. simplifying a function or drawing a graph) and there are improvements in ways of looking at problems, especially the word problems your student probably loves so well, even down to understanding what a prompt is asking. Growing confidence is a process of understanding their strengths and and weaknesses so they can build themselves up by changing the types of questions they have; where once he didn't understand this aspect, now he does and he's moved on to a different level of questioning.

With the first several weeks of successful appointments completed, we will have begun generating habits of mind that will guide your student to more independent success. It is at this time that we should see consistent improvement in scores on individual assessments. As these begin to accumulate, the overall course grade will improve.

"I don't know a lot of math - how can I help my student?"

You can help by asking precise questions. Instead of asking, "How was your appointment?" you can ask, "What did you learn in your appointment today?" The latter question calls for a detailed answer and should help to open your student to sharing the specifics of what she or he accomplished, which makes everyone feel better. If they can explain it to you in a way that makes sense, you can be confident they've made solid progress.

"Does my student need a lot of technology or will it help?"

Technology is not the magic bullet. Since 2012, I have worked at what is regarded as one of the more accomplished public schools in the city and you would be surprised how little technology we use in our upper-level math courses. My goal is to get your student to a place of understanding with the fundamental relationships that underpin the areas of math at hand. Technology will mostly be used as a tool to check work, not to complete it.

"Can you provide a guarantee?"

There are precious few guarantees in direct tutoring. What I can promise is that your student will begin to see math in a different way, one that makes it more accessible and easier to understand and express. With more tools at their disposal, they will come to see it less as an obstacle and more as an entire field of something they can be interested in and even enjoy. Your student's grade in class relies too much on the individual classroom teacher and her or his methods and practices to give rock solid assurances about that.