Tutors can often find themselves in situations where they are instructing children who have stern guardians. Elementary school students, in particular, are much more likely than their older counterparts to give off signs of shyness and unresponsiveness based on a fear of admitting any levels of ignorance with certain problems and questions during a tutorial.
There are cases where parents are aware of a student's true understanding of the day's topic, yet notice that student's fear of demonstrating what he knows in front of the tutor. This can get a parent frustrated enough to intervene in the tutorial with attempts to motivate the child's level of participation and make him/her aware of the competency he/she has; especially if the parent had previous involvement in helping the student develop proficiency with a particular learning objective.
Student malfunction issues such as foolish behavior, unresponsiveness, disrespect and a lack of concentration may bring stern parents to hit their children in the middle of a tutorial as an effort to help keep students focused, to ensure that tutorial time is time well spent and to reestablish a more controlled setting whereas the tutor can work effectively with the student.
Parental Discipline and Punishment
While parents see physical discipline as a sound way of getting their kids to stay focused during home tutorials, kids with misunderstood intentions will feel temporary psychological effects that can prevent their cooperation with a tutor and thus tutorial operation is delayed until the student regains his/her composure. Parental involvement of this stature poses as a shock factor for most elementary school kids. The involvement level can either enhance a student's concentration or ruin his enthusiasm for the day's tutorial. The tutor is compelled to remind the student that there is still work left to be done for the remainder of the session and that the student still has someone in his/her corner to help get through the session with a smile by the end of it.
Child Concentration Abilities
Elementary school children often express a curious and playful nature when working on most learning goals with tutors. The playfulness, however at times can get out of hand and interfere with their ability to concentrate. This occurrence can be well expected with kindergarten and first graders. A tutor's approach in working with this type of student is usually thorough yet somewhat animated. The style of instruction must be laid out in a manner that informs the student that he/she cannot afford to spend to much time giving in to any distractions or choosing to be too playful or disrespectful. Fortunately in time, as students get older, their attention spans and concentration abilities are much more built into their streams of consciousness.
Competency Fears
As children move forward on the road to proficiency, they always encounter roadblocks along the way that impede the learning process and those roadblocks are often because of competency fears, which they often try their best to hide. During home tutorials, these fears invade the student's enthusiasm and cause intimidation with certain tasks and activities, but not as much intimidation as a classroom setting would cause since students only have to worry about the corrections of one person for the most part.
What students can fear the most is admitting when they don't know or understand something. They fear making the kind of mistakes in their work, which are deceptively obvious. Kids at the elementary school level especially hate having anything to do with huge failures because they know for a fact that their guardians hold them in such high regard, and would feel bad about disappointing them. In a classroom setting, children's competency fears become more invasive than ever because, if faced with a situation where their lack of competency is forced out of them by the teacher in front of their peers, they become subject to ridicule, embarrassment and hurt feelings.
Acts of physical discipline will certainly get a student's attention but on the other hand, parents may not realize that the sense of focus that they have instilled upon their kids can distract their enthusiasm while being instructed during a tutorial. The determination level of these kids in focusing on the learning goal of today with the tutor takes a slow pace, especially with tears of regret in their eyes for not working cooperatively. Tutors and parents must continue working together to draw a more definitive line between fun and seriousness for the sake of a student's experimental space, along with the need to learn.
JP Alvarez - JP Alvarez, writer of poetry, drama, and non-fiction, resides in Bronx, New York. He currently works in the field of education as a ...
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