Tutoring: The Omni Difference
Most tutors, whether independently employed or employees of a company, do not have formal teaching experience, and even fewer of them are actually trained as teachers. Why is this important? Because to tutor is to teach. Those unprepared to teach are not effective tutors. They may know the subject matter well, and of course that is the barest minimum needed. The subject may have been the tutor’s major in college and even in graduate school. However, such specialization does not qualify that person to tutor effectively. It merely gives the tutor subject-matter knowledge.
Like teaching, tutoring is not mostly about reciting one’s own knowledge to another person but about using artful methods to help the student understand how the subject matter “works.” Only skilled teachers, with experience and training, are in a position to make a subject understandable, to test in a variety of ways whether the student has grasped and can apply what has been taught, to identify the student’s underlying obstacles to performance (grades, testing), and to prescribe solutions based on professional expertise.
The underlying mythology about all teaching is that whatever is in the reach of universal human experience requires no training in order to teach it. Along with that is the myth that the more commonly used a subject is, the easier it is to teach and the less one needs actual qualifications. The error of this belief becomes obvious when observing how often tutoring companies hire 18-year-olds and 21-year olds with no training to “tutor” when those employees lack trainingand experience. Such tutors are not successful – ending up in jobs way over their heads because they have no idea how to proceed. Similarly, parents of high school students, and these students themselves, have voiced volumes of complaints for decades about mathematicians who are failures at teaching math, programmers who cannot make the subject understandable to non-technicians, and native speakers of a foreign language who are inept at teaching it. More students receive low grades in foreign language instruction in high school than in any other single subject. Yet those same teachers can speak the language fluently and even elegantly.
Parents, you don’t need pals or peers for your student. Your student is not likely to respect them and is even less likely to succeed with such dubious, untrained “guidance.”Nor do you need a self-described tutor with no credentials in the process of teaching. You need a professional, and your son or daughter deserves a professional with training in methodology, with experience, and with a record of success.
At Omni Education, we will never assign an untrained tutor to your student because we never hire the untrained. Our tutors have been tested in the field and proven at their craft. The Owner herself has credentials from two states, scored in the 99th percentile on the National Teachers Exam, graduated on the Dean’s List, and has expertise on all grade levels, including adult. In addition, she has experience with the Learning Disabled and special expertise with the intellectually and artistically gifted. Not only does our tutoring enable better grades in school, it promotes deep mastery which best prepares students for the independence necessary in college and careers.