Benefits to Private Tutoring

There are many benefits to private tutoring. Besides the obvious better grades at school here are a few examples:

• Fewer distractions: In a classroom setting, noise and other interruptions from peer groups can hugely affect your child's performance. This is especially true if your child suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder. Private one-on-one tutoring is a much more controllable environment, and therefore far less susceptible to interference.
• Focus on specific areas: I am able to focus on specific areas that your child may be having problems with. A school teacher will only be able to give limited private attention to students as they are constrained by time and tough targets for subject coverage.
• Confidence and self-esteem: These are extremely important factors to learning any subject. The more confident a child feels with their schoolwork the more creative their thought processes become which means they will be able to grasp complicated concepts much more easily.
• Handling attention span: Your child may only be able to concentrate for 10 minutes before their mind starts wandering onto other things. This is completely normal and almost completely overlooked in the public schooling system. I can recognize when your child's attention span is wavering. A minute or two discussing something else or having a healthy snack or a glass of water will reset the clock to an extent and your child will be able to get back on track quickly.
• Catch-up: Sometimes your child may have missed key points in the syllabus that are now holding them back from understanding the more advanced concepts. I will quickly be able to identify areas that need work and bring your child up to speed. 
• Shy children can ask questions: A lot of children may be too shy to ask questions in class and may then miss out on key points in their subjects. Like a large rock in a fast flowing river this can have repercussions for a long time afterwards. They are much more likely to ask questions in a one-on-one environment with their tutor.
• Coverage: I'm able to cover a lot of detail in a short time. I can work at your child's pace and become very familiar with your child's capacity for learning and the methods that work best with your child when explaining sometimes advanced concepts to them. 
• Help with homework: If your child is struggling with homework I can help! Sometimes they may be asking questions of mom or dad that you just can't answer. Sometimes at the end of a long day in the office you don't want to come home from work to 2 hours of homework help! A private tutor can provide the answers your child needs and the tools your child can use to find the answers themselves.

How do you make sure the money you’re spending with tutoring is benefiting your child?

While tutors once focused on helping children who were falling behind in particular subjects or had a learning disability, they are now being used far more to guide students through particularly tough courses, insure their grades are equal to or above their peers’ and, in the end, polish a child’s college application.

Parents who once would have had in-home tutors are going to tutoring centers, while some using the centers have cut back on hours or moved to online-only platforms. Let's look at tutoring from an investment point of view. Is there any way to measure what parents and children are getting for all this money? What can a tutor reasonably be expected to do? Is this money well spent? But the bigger question that springs from this is, How do you make sure the money you’re spending is benefiting your child?

Helping children improve in areas where they are struggling is clearly important.  Any tutoring should bolster standardized test scores.  Expectations should modest. You’re not going to go from a 550 to an 800 on the SAT, but you can count on a 100-point rise. A lot of that is just getting your child used to taking the test.

Unfortunately parents and administrators have become obsessed with standardizing test.  In fact I believe, this has reached its absurd extreme at times.  School competition is clearly part of parents’ thinking, but it’s not just for college. “Parents are concerned about how their children rank against their friends, their neighbors, kids in the next town over, the next state over ...

On the positive side, for children, tutors can often comfort them and let them talk to someone beyond their parents. They can say what they want and that person will translate it to Mom and Dad. That’s what the kid needs because they’re afraid of letting Mom and Dad down.

This therapeutic value is one good use of the money, but so, too, is how it can make a child feel about school.  Remember test preparations has some importance, but more qualitative measures of success are things like attitude, self-confidence and the willingness to finish homework. Parents appreciate when kids can get their homework done without Mom hovering over them.