Category: About georgetutor

Executive summary: My personal motivation for teaching is to learn more, which in turn helps me to teach better, in a virtuous circle.

When I was a teenager, my math teacher used to throw a party, once a term, for those of his students whose grandparents he had taught! Although I wasn’t a member of this select group, I can easily understand his sense of accomplishment in having taught members of the same families over three generations. Many teachers say they teach to “make a difference”, and behind this lies the motive to provide an enduring legacy, perhaps even to be a teacher that students can tell their grandkids about. When you extend this to their grandkids’ grandkids, his achievement seems even more remarkable. There’s so much to admire in the selflessness of it: one imagines, particularly with math, that the grandparent would have learned much the same concepts as the grandchild did, perhaps even delivered in a similar way. It speaks volumes for the dedication and the patience of the teacher over decades.

I love finding, and giving, insight in the moment.

To be honest, I don’t think this really captures why I teach. I’ll readily admit I’m addicted to teaching, and, after 40 years of returning to the teaching of the same subject – math – it looks like it’s a life-long addiction. However, unlike my old teacher, who incredibly would have earned his First Class degree in mathematics back at Cambridge 100 years ago, I am not a specialist in the subject I most love. The matter of mathematics has an eternal quality to it, which I suppose can be comforting in a world where technological and political churn have changed the face of almost every other school subject. But I don’t think that this is why I teach, either. I certainly like, even adore, the subjects that I teach, but for me it’s a point of pride that I teach across numerous subjects and at many levels. I simply couldn’t claim that the sheer beauty of mathematics has kept me teaching for this long.

Nor is it a fascination with technique or methodology. Even since I started teaching, best practices in teaching subjects like physics and chemistry have developed almost beyond recognition. Textbooks are vastly richer (and arguably less usable) than they were, and computer simulation-based laboratories have sprung up to supplement (or supplant) the dusty old labs of my youth. In statistics, a subject I was among the first to teach for O-level examination in central Africa, entire curricula have now emerged, replete with a well-digested pedagogical vocabulary to assist legions of learners in the data-aware 2020s. Actually, I find myself a little put off by these new assistive techniques. I’m not always comfortable seeing the world through the lens of a highly memorable computer simulation, or even of a novel illustration, no matter how vivid, in a glossy textbook.

So, if it’s not a longing for personal legacy, admiration of the theoretical aesthetics or adherence to the modern methodologies that have kept me teaching, what could it be? This question hasn’t been easy to confront, because one would prefer to represent a philosophy that was clearly good or altruistic – this is the reputation of teaching, after all, and who wouldn’t want to be true to that?

my motivation to teach

is inseparable from my motivation to learn

I think the truth is that I am not really trying to be a teacher, at least not in the sense that some websites might list “the 7 reasons why people become teachers”. Instead, I think of myself as an ingrained, inveterate learner, addicted (there’s that word again) not so much to the pride of seeing the Aha! moment on a student’s face, as to the joy of finding out more about something already partly known. When you learn something new, it proliferates connections to the things that you already know, and this feels good – at least, it does for me! So, if you take a subject like mathematics, study it quite deeply, and then see a new truth, it can be very satisfying. For me, the teacher’s impulse is then immediately to try to show the new connection to someone else.

I would therefore say that students don’t “learn from me” so much as they “learn with me”, and I think that this is the life-spark of teaching that I really enjoy. I love finding, and giving, insight in the moment. And this makes sense, because we all know that one of the best ways to learn a thing is to teach it; and here we have the converse – one of the best ways to teach a thing is to learn it, right there, with the student. By a hall-of-mirrors effect, both parties teach and learn together.

I don’t mean to imply that you can teach like this without a lot of prior knowledge, understanding, experience and preparation. You can’t; and so of course a teacher has to have these elements securely in place. What I’m saying is that my motivation to teach is inseparable from my motivation to learn. Further, the more I learn, the more I can develop my long-term ability to teach, and the more I can appreciate the beauty of the subjects that I study, and the more I find out about how to learn more (i.e. how to teach again) in the future. So, by continuously learning, I inherit all of the benefits that teachers traditionally ascribe to why they teach. To date, I’ve taught several children of my former students: when the first grandchildren of my former students are ready for my lessons, I trust I’ll be ready to learn with and from them.

The bottom line: I am a teacher because teaching gives me the possibility to learn in the company of other learners, and to make a difference in the lives of my students, deepen my understanding of great intellectual subjects and continuously improve my teaching techniques and methods while doing so.

Executive summary: Long-term academic mentoring counteracts poorly delivered courses by personalizing & contextualizing learning.

There’s a cliché that “the best learning is for life”, a truism that rolls easily off the tongue but isn’t at all clear if you stop to consider its meaning. Most people today, and certainly most students, unfortunately think of learning as a contingency for achieving a near-term goal, perhaps to pass a test or to gain acceptance at an institution or to receive a degree at a university. This attitude is understandable in a world in which challenges and needs and methods and solutions are changing incredibly fast, and in which adaptability is therefore considered a key metric for success. However, it completely misses the point that true learning is an exquisite, personal and timeless experience, which is amenable to nurturing but never to force.

a sure solution for learning

in a world of rapid change

You don’t have to look for long to notice the current regrettable prevalence of testing in schools. For many students these days, the whole experience of learning a subject such as physics or mathematics could be described as lurching from one quiz or test to the next, with little time to consider the subject matter in any broader context. Ask a student about this experience, and they’ll almost certainly relate. They may also describe real trauma that they have suffered as a consequence of rapid, test-intensive teaching; and they will probably agree that, weeks or months after a course has finished (usually in the Götterdämmerung of the final examination), they have retained a depressingly small percentage of what the course was supposed to teach. This is hardly surprising in light of the fact that teachers, themselves pressed to deliver to ridiculous agendas, often have to skirt so much foundational or ancillary material that the residue of their curriculum is rendered incoherent. Days missed for staff consultations, teacher training, school system testing, administrative necessities and downright absenteeism don’t make these problems any better.

if you want to learn something well, you should try to learn it more slowly

Some families understandably turn to tutoring to try to navigate these situations, particularly when the speed of their children’s courses outflanks what the parents can remember from their own days at school. For some students, subject tutoring can be enough to accelerate their progress and to compensate for some of the gaps in a course, but, all too often, this merely serves to qualify the student for entry into the next, more advanced, course. Eventually, and especially with structured subjects such as math and science, the Peter Principle of “rising to one’s level of incompetence” takes hold, and the student’s rate of learning can become seriously degraded. This is the sad consequence of racing through earlier curricula in the mistaken belief that faster is better.

Educational literature and social opinion are in solid agreement that, if you want to learn something well, you should try to learn it more slowly. All competent teachers know the time-management techniques that really work. There are spacing effects, whereby you allow time for concepts to take root in students’ minds; spiral learning, where you build understanding incrementally over time by orbiting between topics; and “just in time” introductions, through which you carefully synchronize the curriculum to support the student’s next topic needs. Naturally, these are the first techniques that go out of the window when students and teachers are under extreme time pressure to complete the units of a course by a particular date.

One of the most positive pedagogical developments in recent years has been the recognition that students each have unique characteristics in the ways that they learn. I define long-term academic mentoring to be a fusion between ordinary tutoring, highly personalized teaching delivery, multi-subject support, and the deliberate suppression of the short-term attitude. My own version of long-term mentoring often involves a 2-4 year engagement with a student, typically spanning their learning from middle school through to university, and offering a sense of continuity across several academic subjects. In those years, you can sadly guarantee that the student will experience the rapid delivery and content incoherence that I described above, but you can hope to do something to guard against their worse impacts on the student’s learning potential.

true learning is an exquisite, personal and timeless experience, which is amenable to nurturing but never to force

Long-term academic mentoring establishes a shared dialog with a familiar vocabulary and a learning pattern based on the student’s personal learning preferences. It can counteract confusion in a current course by reminding the student of things learned long before. It can overcome some of the panic and trauma of poorly-delivered courses by representing the course content in a more familiar and tailored way, with proper consideration not only of the context of the subject matter, but also of the student’s current, past and future learning interests. It can pre-empt low grades, by ensuring that the student stays with or even ahead of the course material. More particularly, long-term mentoring supports the student with a figure who may be lacking in their school: a dependable adult person with deep educational expertise, specifically interested in helping that student over a period of many months or years. The mentor can be relied upon to see the student through the short-term shocks, and to help the student stay on a long-term learning path that is likely to foster deeper understanding and much better retention. Thus, long-term mentoring is uniquely positioned to inculcate learning habits and learning skills in the student, to show the student how to work through the inevitable short-term crises at school, to guide the student to learn in ways that work best for them, and to equip the student to learn how to learn more in the future.

The bottom line: Long-term academic mentoring is a sure solution for learning in a world of rapid change, because, properly delivered, it invests students with self-awareness, confidence and adaptability that the fast-moving future will demand, while protecting them from the dangers of excessive speed and testing in the short term.