Tutoring Matters

Book excerpt: Inside each of us is the promise of a tutor. If you've ever taught a child to tie her shoe, or helped a friend with his homework, or even helped a stranger understand a posted sign, you have it in you to empower others through learning. Tutors are allowed to do what teachers and parents are often not able to do. They can be patient, observe, question, support, challenge, and applaud. They can move towards nurturing the true and total intelligence of their tutees. Learning to tutor is simply overcoming fears, sharing and acquiring knowledge, and appreciating the potential and wisdom in each other. Tutoring Matters is the authoritative manual for both the aspiring and seasoned tutor. Using firsthand experiences of over one hundred new and experienced tutors, this long-awaited guide offers chapters on attitudes and anxieties, teaching techniques, and building relationships. It educates the tutor on how to handle and appreciate social and language differences; how to use other adults—teachers, administrators, parents, employers—to a student's advantage; and, when your student or circumstances determine that it's time, how to put a positive and supportive end to the tutor-tutee relationship. Written by experienced tutors and tutoring educators, Tutoring Matters celebrates—and provides just the right tools for—an individualized and successful tutoring relationship and shows just how much you can learn—about the world and yourself—through teaching others. Author note: Jerome Rabow, the recipient of numerous distinguished teaching awards, is co-author of Cracks in the Classroom Wall: An Analysis with Readings. He is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Tiffani Chin is an experienced tutor and Ph.D. Candidate researching education and sociology at UCLA. Nima Fahimian, also an experienced tutor, studies medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine.