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Re: Why More Students Rely on Tutors
Posted:
Oct 5, 2010 5:01 PM
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Mark Ge wrote:
http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=7231749
> I'm just surprised at the variety of choices parents can have
> over choosing tutors for their kids. It seems like there's a
> high demand for tutoring companies so there'll be lots of
> choices as to who to go to for tutoring these days. Back
> when I was in school, I could only access the tutoring
> resources they had at my high school. Now there are all
> these private enterprises that you can choose from.
My experience is even more extreme. I never knew about
high school students ever paying for tutoring when I was
in high school. Of course, when I got to college (and for
several years before I got to college, either while with
my mother in the early 1970s when she semi-periodically
visited some of her college professors ([1] being one
example, and whose personalized memo stationary with math
calculations on it from around 1971-72 I still have) or
when I was taking some college classes while in high
school), tutoring signs were always all over the bulletin
boards, and so I knew people paid for tutoring in college.
But I didn't realize that high school students ever paid
for help, not until the early 1980s when I was tutoring
students for money in a large city (as opposed to a small
college town, where the number of high school students
was sufficiently small that you were generally never
aware of their existence). The method of contact for me,
back then, was that parents called the local university
math department for tutor suggestions and I was one of
those whose names were given out.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_Ethel_Cone
I'm pretty sure no one in my high school paid for
tutoring in math, since the school was rather small
(everyone knew everyone else) and there were only
a handful of mathy kids, all of whom I knew pretty
well -- well enough that I would have known if they
were making money by helping out in math, especially
since I had very little money in high school and would
have jumped at this had I even gotten a whif there was
a chance someone would pay me to help them with math.
It's not that no one needed help in math, it's just
that they'd go ask someone (me or one of the math guys)
during lunch or homeroom or something. Actually, virtually
everyone who had trouble in math didn't consider it worth
their time to bother having someone help them outside
of class, or at least this is how I seem to recall it,
since things seemed to be fairly low-key as far as
grades and such were at my high school once you got
below the top 6 to 8 students in my graduating class
(of about 120).
Dave L. Renfro
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