So many students just resign themselves to what they see as their fate: earnest effort followed by disappointment.
“Not everyone is good at math,” you might shrug.
“I’m just not very good at taking notes,” one 9th-grader, studying for world history, told me ruefully.
“I have a really bad memory — you have no idea. I’m not going to remember!” a trig student insisted to me the other day as I pointed her to one last practice problem.
But through some kind of magic, she got through the entire problem, with only one trivial snag along the way.
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t magic.
So what is it exactly? What separates the students who excel from the students who flounder? Well, here’s what it’s definitely not:
- Hiring a bargain-barrel-priced tutor who thinks that just because they’re smart, they can teach
- Signing up at a tutoring center for cookie-cutter classes
- Resolving to be super duper extra careful next time
- Spending even more time studying for the test
And the way I know that not just any tutor will work — nor will aimlessly taking practice test after practice test — is that I encounter this scene disturbingly often:
An SAT prep scene
Me: “I took a look at what the [test prep company] tutor wrote here, and I have a feeling that whatever he tried to show you here is not something you would ever do on your own.”
R., high school class of 2020: “Yeah! When we do corrections for the questions I got wrong, he shows me how to get the answer, and I get it, but I dunno … my school teaches math differently than most — I never would’ve thought to do it his way.”
Me: “Yeah, no, we’re going to do better than that.”
Instead, what if you could …
- Hire an expert who knows her topics inside and out, from multiple angles, so she can find an explanation that works for you?
- Get personalized feedback and help from someone who diagnoses your knowledge gaps and strategy blind spots, so that what you learn in our sessions is tailored to you, where you’re at, and how your brain works?
- Construct the mental framework that helps you process a flood of information, so that you’re not inundated by math formulas and history facts?
- Come up with a systematic approach to a given problem type, a process you can count on, so that each question doesn’t feel like Everest anew?
- Build the executive functioning skills that are crucial to smooth academic progress, like staying organized, breaking big projects into smaller tasks to avoid overwhelm, keeping track of what you’re doing in the middle of a long math problem, and not letting assignments slip through the cracks?
Working with me isn’t just homework help.
As my full-time job, I coach my students to build the independence they need to cut a clear path through their work so that they end up on top, calm and in control.
Tutoring with Stephanie 