The commute is quietly stealing something important

To learn well, a child needs to be calm and to be able to focus. The child needs to be able to settle down before learning. Now imagine a 20 minute car ride to a tutoring center. There is traffic. There is noise. There are arguments with siblings. A child is hungry. You arrive at an unfamiliar location. The child has to sit in a strange location under strange lighting surrounded by strange people. The child has to learn in this environment. It is like asking someone to swim laps in an airport after running through it.

Home-based tutoring removes many of the potential distractions to learning prior to their happening. The tutor arrives at your home for the scheduled tutoring session. The student’s’ snacks are probably in the kitchen. The dog may be running around in the house but that can generally be dealt with prior to the session.

Home-based learning is easier to schedule when there is less to coordinate.

The variable that needs to be controlled in order to ensure consistency is YOU. By providing tutoring services to a family’s child in their home, the family does not have to worry about the many variables that can affect consistency when utilizing center tutoring.

Families already have a lot on their plate and to add worry to their plate whether their child’s tutor will arrive on time is too much for many families to handle.

But when a tutor arrives at a child’s home on a regular basis at the same time on a regular basis, the child can rely on that to create a good learning environment.

Many families have the best of intentions to support their children’s academic progress but struggle to keep up with regular tutoring sessions due to the chaos of their lives. There is no reason that a family has to let the typical schedule of school, after school activities, dinner, homework, bath time and bed have to interfere with a child’s learning in a home-based setting of learning.

Finding a home tutor to work with your child could be an ideal way to incorporate some extra learning support into their life. A good qualified home tutor would be able to provide your child with some structured and organized learning on a regular basis. He or she would be able to come to your home to work with your child and there would be no need for a lengthy commute to a tutoring center for your child’s learning support.

Fewer Distractions (Really)

A child’s learning environment is also a part of their home. Often people believe that home are full of distractions to learning such as TV’s, toys, other children etc. But once a tutor arrives at the home of a student they too become part of that learning environment.

A tutor may discover that a student focuses well enough at the dining table but not in their bedroom for example.

That same tutoring center would have no idea of these small differences between locations in a home and every session would have to start from scratch with the same staff or different staff every time.

A tutoring center does not know what to expect when a student walks in off the street. The student may be in a place that is unfamiliar and noisy, and he/she may have to travel a long distance to get to the tutoring center.

When the student arrives at the tutoring center, the tutor will have to take time to get the student to calm down and to focus. The tutor will have to get to know the student’s learning style and implement a learning plan with the student.

The student will have to take time to get to the tutoring center in the first place.

This is how to compare Home Tutoring with Learning Centers:

A few signs home tutoring might actually be the right fit for your child…

• Your child freezes up in new or unfamiliar environments, needing an eternity to warm up before they're really present

• Scheduling is genuinely brutal right now, and adding another destination would mean dropping something else entirely

• Your child has a specific learning pace or style that group settings simply can't accommodate

• Previous tutoring attempts fizzled out mostly because of logistics, not lack of effort or desire

A few signs home tutoring might actually be the right fit

There is quite a bit of research on how Psychological Safety impacts student learning. It is a really interesting area of Educational Psychology. Research indicates that kids who feel safe take more risks in learning. They ask more questions. They are willing to admit confusion in front of their peers. They perform well in learning in order to receive approval from their teacher and from their peers.

There are certain things about a child's environment that help them to learn better. The learning environment that a child finds most comfortable is their home. Home is where children are surrounded by things and people that are important and meaningful to them. In the familiar setting of their home, children are able to focus best on new information. When a home tutor in Union City comes to the child, they are working in the one place the child already feels safe and the child is familiar with their tutor.

(And, yes, there are very good tutoring centers out there and very good kids who thrive in them. But there are also many many families already struggling to keep their children on track academically, and the additional stress of trying to coordinate tutoring sessions at a tutoring center is just too much for most of them.)

I wish there were more ways for me to assist families in dealing with scheduling of and managing of tutoring sessions. Right now I am unable to identify them, and so the best way for families to manage their child's learning is to bring good quality tutoring into the home in this way, with all the problems that it alleviates. There are not a lot of shortcuts in education. But it is worth searching out when you find it.