A P5 boy, who hated math, came to our centre.
No, his mother brought him here. (So he didn’t come willingly.)
‘Where’s your son?’ I asked the mom when I saw her in our centre.
‘He’s stuck at your door.’
It took a while for his son to come in, without being forced.
He’s a math hater. He only likes to play soccer.
Fast forward three months, he scored his first B. (He had been failing since P3)
Mother was shocked. She had a home tutor who had been tutoring his son for the past 3 years. Never got past the 50-mark.
‘All his tutor gave him was just assessment books and more assessment books. You know I couldn’t teach so I believe his math tutor. But you’re different. You gave him his self-confidence back. Now he can even do his math homework without me nagging at him.‘
This is THE difference between math tuition and math coaching.
Traditional math tutors generally just go through the math questions with the students.
‘You don’t know how to do this question. I teach you how. You don’t know how for that. I teach you how.’
(Rinse and repeat)
But math coaches put at least 5 times more the effort and time.
They first befriend the child, understand the child’s weakness and strength in math, find out why he dislike math and then develope a plan to work together with the child on his problem sums concepts.
Compared to normal math tutoring, math coaching is harder and require more energy, patience and empathy. (This is why most tutors prefer not to go by this route. Just giving questions and more questions is the easy way out. Just mark and give more.)
In another instance, a P4 girl attended our math coaching programme just for 2 months. Her marks jumped from 60+ to 80+.
She was so happy that she jumped on her mom when she showed her the paper.
Mom was so happy. Plus shocked because her ex-tutor (who self-proclaimed he’s the top math tutor in Singapore) was not able to help the girl move past the 80-mark after so many years.
But we could do it within 2 months.
So what did we do differently?
We realised the girl hated math.
But she wanted to do well. Just that she felt that learning math was boring.
What we do is we used game-based learning to reignite her interest.
We also gave her 3 questions as homework for a start. (I know most parents would feel 3 is too little.)
Even the girl’s mommy was skeptical at first.
‘Just 3 questions? Isn’t it a waste of her free time?’
Soon, the mom realised for herself why we did this.
Just after the first lesson, the girl got so motivated that she did 4 questions (instead of the 3 we gave her.)
From then on, she became a self-motivated learner and did more questions by herself.
Mom had never seen her so motivated before.
Scoring 80+ got mom convinced our math coaching programme is totally different from math tuition.
What we did is we motivated her to self-discover her reason to learn math.
What her ex-tutor did was just give her more questions. (which she hated)
The last check with her mom is she doesn’t need any tutor to help her anymore. (So another difference, math coaches work with your child to become a self-directed learner. And I know it’s what most parents want. Right? ;p)
So if you’re a parent who wants your child to only do questions after questions (most children get bored and eventually shut off), it’s ok to look for a tutor.
However, if you’re a parent who wants your child to like to learn math so that eventually she can learn to be self-motivated, look for a math coaching programme.
To find out if our math coaching programme can help your child, you can sign up for our free math consultation today.
=> http://studysmart.learningoutofthebox.org/free-math-consultation/