What does my child gain from getting homework help from a tutor?

While some of the students here at The Hut have specific subjects that they come in for help with, many of them, especially middle school and early high school students, come in for general homework help. Many of these students are already doing well in their classes, so it would be easy to question what benefit they get from “simply” doing their homework with a tutor.

However, as many of our tutors can attest, even students who are completing their homework on time, turning their work in, and passing their tests are often still making mistakes in their homework habits that can come back to hurt them later on. For example, one student was getting all of the correct answers on her math homework and doing well on her math tests.

A simple answer check and grade check would have indicated that there was nothing she needed to work on with a tutor. However, with closer examination, her tutor realized that her work was a mess. She was skipping steps in her work by doing the math in her head, not putting new steps in the problem on a new line, and sometimes was making easy-to-avoid math errors because of this. In addition, when work isn’t neat, when students do start making mistakes it is very difficult for them to go back in their work and figure out where they went wrong—which makes it even harder to fix the mistake! When her tutor noticed the problems in her work, they worked together to figure out strategies that would work for her to make her work neater and to avoid making mistakes in the future. While homework mistakes like this can often slip under the radar during middle school when classes are still easy (at least relative to high school!), it is crucial for a tutor to catch them early on so that students have already solidified positive homework habits by the time they get to more difficult classes. In difficult classes, good homework habits can make the difference between an A and a B or between passing and not passing.