Tutoring Without Tears

image: earl53

Parent tears, that is. With the cost of a professional tutor ranging in most areas from $30 to $100 an hour, getting help for a struggling young student can be financially painful -- as well as logistically challenging, if you need to get your kid to the tutor's office. Instead, try pairing your child with an older student who can help with homework in your home and won't charge an arm & a leg. Bright, patient high schoolers can be a perfect match for K through 8th graders, while college students can make great helpers and role models for high schoolers. Teen and young-adult students may not have the specialized expertise of a hardcore pro tutor, but they can ease HW anxiety at a much more modest price, usually $15-$25 an hour. Because they're fresher from the experience of whatever grade your kid is in, they can be more empathetic too, which goes a long way. And with college costs skyrocketing, employing students is a truly win-win kids-helping-kids arrangement.

Sibling Support

Over the past couple weeks I've been interviewing moms and dads on behalf of a local startup organization aimed at helping parents connect. Several have mentioned putting a priority on helping build relationships & support between their kids, which I just love.

One family has scaled down extracurricular activities to allow their kids enough time in the yard together. Aware that she and her husband won't always be around, this mom knows how important it is to give the sibs time now to bond, have fun, and learn to share and negotiate with one another--so that later on, if times get tough they'll have a foundation for mutual support.

Another mom re-entered full-time work last year and has four kids at home. The transition has pushed her to insist they help each other with things like homework, even implementing a policy whereby she won't assist unless they've tried more than once on their own, while she's at work, and asked a sibling for help. Depending on the kids' ages and personalities, this could be tricky, but I love the idea of making sibling support a standard operating procedure for homework.

A third parent talked about how the youngest kid in a family is often dragged around to older siblings' sports games and events, then when it's his/her turn on the field, nobody shows. In their family, the expectation is that the boys will attend as many of their brothers' events as possible. This was inspiring to me, as getting our 2 less sporty kids to their brother's ballgames has been a challenge. Something to work on.

(photo: parents.com)

Oh Brother

Excessive homework really gets my goat, but if there's a silving lining this school year, it's that with 2 fifth graders and a seventh grader, I've been forced to share the support role with the kids themselves. Many teachers assert HW is a reinforcement of lessons learned in class and should need little to no parent involvement, but the truth is, in a challenging district kids often do need help. It gets stressful when two or more kids need support at the same time, in different ways and with diverse tasks. I started asking the boys to help each other, especially with test preparation. Although I feel spelling tests are mostly a waste (reading for pleasure, an unfortunate casualty of too much homework, is a much better way to learn spelling), I'll admit it's a pleasure to hear the boys quiz each other on spelling words. For social studies and science the twins will make flashcards online and lay them out upside down to play concentration together, matching terms & definitions. One thing I noticed is whereas I tend to be all business when studying with them--let's go; dinner's not making itself!--I'll hear them giggling and goofing off while they're helping each other...yet they still manage to get it done. The key has been to ask them to help each other only with clear-cut, easily defined tasks. And of course there's enough complicated, confusing work that I'm not out of a job just yet :(

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