Finding better explanations

Another advantage for individual students taking math tutoring sessions

Recently, one of my students told me:

“I like your lecture style better than my professor’s. You have a much better way of explaining the subject. He just starts doing problems, and that’s it. Last time he was having a hard time explaining how he was using the absolute value to solve a problem. We were all confused about it, nobody was understanding what he was doing.”

Sometimes when you are studying math, and you see a topic for the first time, you struggle to understand it, and you work out examples until you find a way to get it. Then if you are a teacher, and you only have that one way of understanding the subject, you go out teaching it that way, and sometimes you confuse all of your students.

Some teachers care a lot about their students understanding their lectures but some other teachers do not care that much. Sometimes they think: “Well, if they don’t get it, though luck.” However, teachers who care about their students understanding the subject, they spend a lot of time thinking up alternative explanations, or better examples, or better ways to illustrate what’s happening.

I remember a few times (years back when I was a teacher) I felt kind of depressed, disappointed, or frustrated at the end of a lecture because I couldn’t find a way for my students to understand what I was trying to explain. Then, afterwards, I would spend hours, days, even weeks sometimes looking for better ways to explain a particular topic, and the next time I taught that course I was able to explain those topics much better.

I noticed when I started private tutoring, that really sped up the process for me, of finding better explanations, because sitting with students one-on-one, and taking the time to go in depth and in detail with them over their doubts and questions, many times I was able to discover exactly how my students in class were looking at specific problems.

That allowed me to discover faster the reasons why they were not understanding a subject, or why some of my explanations were not working. By tutoring individual students, I was able to find a lot faster a lot more alternative ways of explaining subjects when my students in a large class felt the need for those better explanations.

Tutoring individual students has helped me to focus on finding the best way for each student to understand a given subject, rather than focusing only on covering the whole subject fast in front of a big class.