No, not Rodney Dangerfield style (reference), but for real!
Hello, wise and worldly tutors! Welcome to the 2012-13 school year. Are you ready for it...or, better yet, is it ready for you?
If you're brand new to tutoring and have found our blog while searching the internets, then welcome. We hope you'll keep up with our posts, respond as much as you like (or not at all if you're the lurker type), and learn a little bit about yourself as an educator and as a student.
So, I posed this question to my tutors at our pre-semester meeting, and I thought I'd ask it of the cyberspace citizens, too: How do you utilize silence in your tutoring sessions? As an English teacher/tutor, I love talking. I think we've all felt like this guy sometimes--we try to squeeze so much information in such a short amount of time--and we rarely feel like we can let up! Of course, that results in tutees feeling overwhelmed, but it also means that they don't get a chance to speak for themselves or learn at the appropriate speed. So slowing down--even staying completely quiet for a short amount of time--can be extraordinarily beneficial. Trouble is, we don't give ourselves the chance to do that because we're trying to cram one last chemistry equation into their session before they run off to class.
This situation is analogous to cramming, and we all know how that goes. As tutors, we're taught to caution students against cramming on the (very true) scientific basis that it doesn't work. The mind needs to time to process and organize new information, and cramming doesn't give it time to do that. (In fact, new research suggests that we do a lot of this subconscious processing and organizing while we sleep.) So if you can't cram when you're studying, you also can't cram during a tutoring session. Yes, tutees are often panicky and anxious, but that just makes the situation worse. As tutors, we have to know when to slow down--or even shut up completely--and let our tutees' brains think and minds process.
Do you do this enough? Too much? What are the side benefits of keeping quiet?
