August 15, 2024
I recently saw this post on Reddit, and it made me laugh:
If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school. If you want to be a CPA, you need to take the Series 7 (is that right? I have no idea about how to become and accountant). If you want to become a tutor, you…
Do it with me now, just say it out loud: “I’m a tutor!”
Great. Now you, too, are a tutor.
And if you want to get good, maybe you can convince someone who runs a tutoring company to train you before they plug you into their system and take 50% of your earnings.
This is a strange system. It reminds me of the middle ages.
While there are some exceptions to this rule (LXT member Alicia Carpenter is the CEO of Forum Education, which takes a much lower percentage), the status quo makes this industry a bit like the wild, wild west.
It got me thinking: if there was a certification program, what would it look like? Here are some ideas:
1. Teach Established Principles of Cognitive Science
Spaced repetition, metacognition, and cognitive load are really basic principles of Cognitive Science that teachers ignore all the time. Reducing Cognitive Load = don’t make shit too complicated, yet I see slides like this one all the time:
2. Give Personalized Feedback
Oooooh, this is one scary but necessary. I have interviewed and hired hundreds of tutors, and most people are terrible when they start. They talk to much, they don’t know what to say, they are nervous, they keep bringing up the Yankees, etc etc. I was there, too, for a long time. But training programs where I got real feedback (notably Manhattan Prep’s 100 hour training program and the guidance of Matt Bardin at Zinc) made me better. How often in this life do you get the chance to get real, honest feedback from a master?
3. Encourage schemas that work
At its core, tutoring involves sharing frameworks (or schemas) that work to accomplish the task at hand. I have a famously good one for teaching commas (8 rules; 4 major and 4 minor uses). If you have great schemas, you can communicate them and change thinking effectively. Schemas.
LXT Member of the Month:
See you next month!
LXT