Online Math Tutoring Helps

When I was in middle school, my parents started to realize that I was not being challenged in math class. It was a big problem because I was falling asleep in math lessons in school. I was not engaged in class because class was moving so slowly. They decided to go to our guidance counselor for advice and she suggested that I start working with a math tutor. She recommended a teacher from the magnet high school who tutored on the side. We hired him and I started working ahead of the class. I would go on to skip a level of math and was in class with older kids from then on. But I never did realize just how annoying the tutor was around until later. I really disliked him at the time, but I learned recently that after our first session, he told my mother, “There is nothing special about your son.” Every week we had to put a plate of cookies out for him and he would eat all my cookies while criticizing my math skills. I wish that I had worked with an online math tutor. I might have been stuck with someone like him, but I could have cut the cord with an online tutor and found someone new.

For tutors, the online market is fickle. Loyalty goes down because you are not making the same relationship with the student that you would in person. That and it is much harder to fire someone in person than it is when you are online. That said, the market grows immensely, so the need for consistent students is lessened. Normally, regular clients are a good thing, but tutoring is like Uber, where you benefit from working with different people. You learn pretty quickly that you can get the same value from tutors if you are smart about how you manage things. Too many sessions start with people trying to gauge levels of knowledge, but online tutors can be successful by jumping right into the lessons. You have to manage your own lessons as a student, so that changes things. For example, a consistent tutor knows what you learned and what comes next, but online tutors are much better when you want to learn different concepts a la carte. If you are going to tutors only when you are struggling with a concept, you can go right to a tutor and make sure that you get the help you need to improve.

I will say that I used online tutors later after the sour experience with an in person tutor and it was a much different experience. In fact, all other in person tutors I worked with were great. But the thing I loved about online math tutoring was that it was there when I needed it and went away when I did not. I was not wasting time and neither were the tutors because we got in and got out with me learning math and them getting paid.