The best thing about tutoring is: the opportunity to find success through anothers’. For every achievement, milestone, and triumph over academia, you are there beside your student. The successful tutor takes pride in helping his or her students achieve their academic goals, as their accomplishments reflect the quality and care of the teaching you’ve provided.

The position of a tutor requires patience, flexibility, and often a bit of ingenuity to relate
material that a student is struggling with. Sometimes the struggle results from poor in-class instruction; other times, it results from a wall being put up, as is the case with the mutually hated subjects (read: Chemistry, Geometry, and Trig). From this wall, springs a fountain of: “I hate this class,” “when am I ever going to use this?” and the banal “I don’t get it.” Ultimately, the goal of every successful tutor is to cap this negative-thought fountain and establish a strong base for breaking down the barriers of understanding. If a strong conceptual understanding is established, the student can go forth and apply
what he or she has learned both in and outside of class. The development of acute critical thinking skills in high school, junior high, even elementary school, is imperative to their successful triumph over the multitude of problems that college, and life, will throw at them. It is our job, as tutors, to cultivate these skills through theoretical and practical applications.

I work with many Chemistry honors and AP students, and although I can’t convince all of them that being able to synthesize the Sodium Laureth Sulfate in their shampoo bottle is really cool, I can convince them that Chemistry is totally conquerable. By relating a subject’s facts and ideas to everyday concepts (i.e. combustion reactions produce water: that’s why some cars drip water from their tailpipes) and being upfront about what is expected of them in their courses (sorry, but the polyatomic ions are just rote memorization), I’ve found success as a tutor.