Tutoring Update

Lately there has been a great deal of frenzy and frustration during and because of tutoring sessions. There have been multiple instances where not a single student has come or one or two students come, but with almost nothing to work on or seeming as though they would rather be anywhere but at tutoring. I personally have not seen the student I had been working with and beginning to form a relationship with in over three weeks. 

I think this is an important moment for my fellow tutors and me to take the opportunity to take a step back and put our teacher thinking caps on to see what we could do to better help our students or encourage them to come. It is so important to remember that these students have lives that we know nothing about. Many of our students have not opened up about their personal lives, which is fine, but this means that we as future educators have to assume that these students have other responsibilities that are preventing them from coming to tutoring rather than jumping to the conclusion that they just do not want to come. 

A few days ago a teacher at the high school mentioned that we should not take the students' absence personally. After thinking about this for a few days, I could not agree more. Many of us tutors, myself included, are still developing cognitively and are working towards getting out of the phase where we are primarily concerned with ourselves. It is very easy to feel as though we are wasting our time by driving out to the high school to have no students show up, but that is not the case. Even if we as tutors are not getting the valuable teaching time in relation to tutoring the students, we are learning even more important components in relation to teaching and our lives in general, which are time management and to think of others before we think of ourselves.