4 Benefits of Getting Tutored
There is often negativity surrounding the idea of getting tutored in college. You may think seeking out that extra help means you aren’t “smart enough” to handle the class by yourself, but even professors themselves can and will encourage their students to seek help as needed, whether it comes in the form of going to office hours or taking advantage of an academic help center on campus.
Getting personally tutored on whatever subject you find yourself struggling with has many benefits that you definitely wouldn’t see if you were to keep your struggles to yourself, and can be what gets you to the grade you’re working so hard for.
1. You get to choose the time and place
Although you may really want to go to office hours to seek help, your schedule may conflict with the time slots that your professors and/or TA have set. Getting a tutor, however, will allow you to have more control over what time you can get the extra help you need.
If you hire a personal tutor, you will be able to discuss and choose a time and place that works best for both of you. If you feel that you work best in a certain setting, like a private study room or coffee shop, you can talk with your tutor to hold your tutoring sessions in a place that would benefit you the most.
Being able to choose the time and place to get tutored will also allow you to be more focused and comfortable during the tutor sessions as you won’t have to force yourself to study after a long shift at work or in a place where you aren’t exactly comfortable.
2. You can pick the pace
If you’re just going to lecture, you are going to be learning material at the pace of the professor’s teaching. You spend one lecture on a decided subject, then move on to another subject in the next class. If you are stuck on a certain subject, your professor can’t just stop their planned schedule of lessons so that you or another classmate could have more time on a concept they are struggling with and have the whole class fall behind.
This set pace can make it easy to fall behind in a course if you find yourself struggling with earlier concepts even as you are moving onto more challenging ones that build off of earlier ones. This may be what pushes you to finally hire a tutor, as a tutor will allow you to spend the time you need to work through a concept until you thoroughly understand it.
At the beginning of your tutoring, you may discuss a pace to get through the course material, but the point of a personal tutor is to be able to have your learning experience adapt to your own needs and to get the help that you need.
3. You can be more comfortable with asking questions
Depending on how big a lecture or discussion is, you may find yourself struggling to raise your hand and ask a question when you need help. You may think that no one else is struggling and that you are holding up the entire class for a “silly” question, or just don’t want to look like the one that can’t grasp the concepts being taught.
However, when you have a personal tutor, they are there for you and only you. They are there to teach you and answer any of your questions as they come up. You won’t be interrupting a whole class when you speak up on anything you are struggling with and your tutor will happily stop where you are at in tutoring to make sure you understand a concept before moving on to another.
4. Your learning needs will be taken into account
Everyone has different learning needs, and in college, it’s even harder for everyone’s to be taken into consideration when classes are so large and everyone’s needs vary. You may be a visual learner and like things to be drawn out in figures and models, but your professor may just rely on PowerPoint slides full of text to teach during lecture.
When you have a personal tutor, they will work with you to figure out what teaching style will get the most results in terms of you getting a full understanding of the subject. If they know you are a visual learner, they will know to incorporate more visual aspects to your tutoring sessions, like diagrams and models to further break down concepts.