I’ve been a tutor for 40 years, and I’ve never encountered a lazy student.

Scratch the surface of laziness and underneath you’ll find fear, confusion, frustration, lack of knowledge, lack of skills, anger, sadness…

And, often, just plain exhaustion.

Willpower is a limited resource, and the demands of the school day can drain a student of her ability to attend and persevere.

There’s a dead dog lying in the middle of the road, and we both see it.

As if jolted by a cattle prod, my highly sensitive companion rears in her seat and wails. Ooooooohhhh Nooooooooo!!!! She trembles and her eyes well up.

Meanwhile, I just keep on driving. I’d been deep in our conversation, and the meaning of that inert, furry heap in the center of the roadway hasn’t  yet registered in me.

So by now we’ve driven right past the dog and quite a distance beyond, and I still haven’t said a word or even slowed down, and my friend is choking on tears.

We’re easily a quarter of a mile away when I mutter We need to go back.

I turn the car around and return to where the dog still lies, and I pull over and step out and look both ways before walking out and dragging the dog’s body to the curb.

I wrote about my dad yesterday, and today I’m thinking about my mother.

She was very fond of this old-timey saying:

If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.

I know, I know…pure Pollyanna…

but those words actually sank in.

[I'm going to try devoting my Monday blog posts to the topic of Learners with Special Needs, which, I find, describes us all in some way or another.]

I’m so impressed with the Khan Academy videos, and I’ve been experimenting with ways to use them with my students….and with myself!

Several factors have thrown me off my nice, comfortable writing routine, including some extra part-time work and then a freak snowstorm that left us without power or Internet access for a week.

I stopped blogging because my routine had been disrupted. My morning writing time was no longer available, and that’s when my head was in “writing mode.”

Do math tutors ever suffer math anxiety?

I do, sometimes, when I know I’m going to have to teach a topic that lies at the outer boundary of my own expertise.

So, yes, I am feeling anxious right now, because this afternoon I’m going to have to help a student with some pretty sophisticated trigonometry (including those dreaded “ferris wheel” problems). It’s stuff I don’t do every day…and it’s hard!

Here’s how I’m coping:

I just finished doing a talk at one of my local libraries, called Tons of Tips to Help Your Child Learn Better!

My favorite tip is the simplest: HELP THEM.

It’s pretty amazing how parents hesitate to just sit down next to their child and offer some basic assistance. It’s usually for one of two reasons:

This fall, I’m going to be doing some talks at various schools, on the subject of “special needs” learners.

I find that all learners, be they child, adult, “gifted,” “average,” or “special needs” (whatever these labels might mean), need the same things:

Practice. There’s a mystique about the gifted: that they “get” everything automatically, without studying. In fact, the smart kids in the class study more. They tend to read more, and they think about intellectual subject matter as they move through their day, even when they’re not actually pouring over a textbook.

We often excuse struggling learners from practice, cut their homework load down, set lower expectations…and the result is that they miss out on the practice they need, and they fall further and further behind.

Lots of folks seemed to like my first five tips, so here are five more!

1. Avoid opening a can of worms. The act of helping can set off all sorts of power and control dynamics. Sometimes it’s more genuinely helpful to farm the task out to someone neutral. It’s one main reason parents use tutors like me; I’m a third party who can get their kid to do his homework without the power struggles.
2. Now’s not the time to teach a lesson. It’s tempting (especially if you are a parent or a spouse) to seize upon your loved one’s problem as an opportunity to drive your point home and (finally!) get them to shape up in some way. I keep in mind the words of Dr. Haim Ginott: When a person is drowning is not the time to teach him to swim. In a crisis, what is needed is rescue and comfort, not lessons or advice. There’s time for that later.
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Too many chiefs and not enough indians! my mom would cry.

She’d ask for a small, simple piece of help (Would you please grab one end of this coffee table?)…

…and instead we’d pepper her with unsolicited questions and opinions and advice:

Why are you moving it? It looks fine here! Are you sure you’re supposed to be lugging furniture around? What about your back? It’s about time you got rid of that coffee table, and the sofa’s pretty shabby, too. You really ought to break down and spend some money on new furniture. What will the neighbors think? Have you ever used Murphy’s soap; it might take out that stain….