My motto is “Great students deserve great support.”
Grade pressures, social pressures, and the expectations of their teachers and parents can keep students feeling buried, lost, and worried they’ll never get it.
I see teachers who make the anxiety worse. In some classrooms, wrong is never acceptable and intense pressure is the lever to wedge knowledge deep into student’s heads. I disagree with this approach. Want to teach a child something is bad and worth doing only under duress? Force them fail over and over again in a room full of peers in a toxic culture of perfection above all else! I sympathize with the teachers. I taught this way, too. Now that I’m on the outside and can see the effects, I never will again.
In tutoring I help my students understand that learning is a million failures and one success, that learning is a process in which they’ll get it wrong until they get it right, that learning by looking for the right answer is the wrong thing to do. I want them to have a safe space to fail and a helping hand to lift them up. Parents can help here, too. Tell your kids that their goal is progress, rather than a certain grade. We should all work for process over product.
My motto is “Great students deserve great support.” Let’s all support our learners rather than focusing on their wrong answers. In learning, we’re all wrong until we get it right. Let’s treat students the same way.
Physics and Math are hard! Ask your teacher for help if you need it. Ask me if you need more.