Tutoring to the beat of our own drum

All schools have their own teaching style, usually based on the curriculum and then tweaked a bit in each in particular classroom. Well I have realized since being abroad and speaking with other teachers at other schools that it seems cultures also have a very distinct teaching style. Here in Korea it is very much a ‘no nonsense’ attitude towards education and studying outside of school. Most Korean schools have a very rigid format that they put together to ensure success and each child must learn to fit into this mold. Well, I will vouch for their instincts with many of their teaching methods, they are a bit demanding but spot on….it breeds many fluent English speaking children with bright futures ahead of them. This can even be seen with my Kinders who could hold a conversation in understandable broken English with just about anyone who was fluent. This is very impressive in my book!

Well, with any strict and rigid format there will be the outliers; the children that do not fit into this mold. They do not learn at the rate everyone else is learning and they need more from their teacher besides workbooks and standardized tests that somehow can judge how smart they are. So many of the schools over here put incredible emphasis on being at ‘your age level’, and don’t give credit to the ones that are making progress just at a slower rate. Well I don’t think teaching, along with many other things, should so simply be put into a box like that. There IS such a thing as personalized teaching and teachers that don’t mind bending a little unconventional if it makes a child succeed.

This is ever so apparent with the child I tutor. He is a year or more behind his ‘age level’ and has had many tutors with not much progress and success. Well after some time getting to know him, he uttered this sentence to me; “I no like school, it too hard.” A light bulb went off and I knew we had to change his mind set before progress was made. I talked to my manager, telling her the material she wanted me to teach him was too hard and we were not making progress, and that I would like to decide myself how to proceed with this child. Being that so many people thought he was a lost cause, would make eyes in his direction (probably thinking “ohhh poor boy”), I was given permission to proceed as I saw fit. Well THANK GOD, because that was the day things changed for this child.

Now we play games with English words on flashcards, memory games and matching games being his favorites, and he smiles and laughs in tutoring. We draw on the board and make sentences both written and verbal with our new words. He loves to draw and is wonderful at it, so we draw detailed pictures of the places we are learning about, or pictures of the body labeling each body part. We run around the school putting flashcards on objects that describe the word, (like BEAUTIFUL would be placed on a rose), and we point out things we see in the school and practice vocabulary. I had been giving him tests that I would make for him throughout our months of tutoring, but recently I gave him a comprehensive one to cover the past 2.5 months of vocabulary and information we have covered. Well, I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face and neither could he because he scored a 95 out of 100! When I told my boss this she said, “Wow, he has never gotten a score like that in his life!” I was proud of him and so glad that I was reaching this child with my unorthodox yet necessary teaching methods. I even received a compliment from my boss, which she does not dish out lightly, telling me that my teaching method was wonderful and is proving to be successful. She said she was really ‘impressed.’

Me and my tutoring kid smile and laugh and he enjoys school with me. Who’s to say it should be any different?