By TuitionBean

02/05/2015 Home Tuition Mistakes 6 Lethal Mistakes All Singaporeans Parents Make Finding Home Tuition
It's dangerous. It's deadly. It's disastrous. Finding a home tutor for your child has never been easier than navigating through a minefield. One misstep and you can hard-earned savings might just evaporated without bettering your child's future.
Here are 6 Lethal Home Tuition Mistakes you will definitely want to avoid:

1) Having Too Much Home Tuition
Yes, having more tuition doesn’t always lead to better performance and it can even be counterproductive. There are two reasons for this.
First, home tuition takes away precious self-revision time which is just as essential. Studying independently creates an introspective environment for revision. This allows your child to question his or her own competency without the assistance of others, crossing what psychologist terms as the “zone of proximal development”, crucial to achieving competency in the subject.
More importantly, self-revision is a crucial process that requires enough time to be set aside, as it allows the person to engage in what psychologists term as a state of flow. Have you ever been so absorbed in a certain task till you lose track of time? You would have achieved flow and attained temporary hyper-focus. The same applies to revision and this is also the period in which your child achieves mastery of the subject.
Over-tuition deprives your child of revision time. The challenge here, however, is not to eliminate home tuition altogether, but to calibrate it optimally such that your child has sufficient assistance and at the same time, adequate self-revision time.
2) Under-Tuition
Too little would kill as well.
Maybe it is in our blood to be “kiam siap” or thrifty. Some parents arrange impractical tuition structures, for example, two hours per week for two times a month for a single subject. Or they can hire a single tutor four times a week for two hours each, but for four subjects! Tuition is at the core a form of medication to heal the child’s grade. However, does anyone really recover from a cough by just one huge spoonful of cough syrup? They will not have enough subject exposure and neither will the tutors have enough time to identify your child’s weaknesses.
In the end, you would have completely wasted your home tuition fees. Not to mention the time taken up which could otherwise have been used for productive revision
So, if you want to get private tuition for your child or yourself, don’t spread your tuition fees too thinly. You would be better off not getting home tuition.
Learn where to find the balance with our experienced coordinators at +6598255838 or +6593626436
3) Not Changing Tutors
Has your child ever lamented that the school teacher is hopeless and how he wishes that their teacher can be replaced by that fabulous teacher from another class? The same logic applies for home tuition. Home tuition is inefficient if the home tutor is incompatible and it is time to give the tutor the axe!
Yet, people don’t sack their home tutors.
Parents and students hesitate because they feel “paiseh” or embarrassed to change their private home tutors. Sacking them would seem akin to telling them that they are useless. The embarrassment is amplified when the tutors interact with them on a one to one basis and a rapport develops.
You must collect constant feedback from your child about the tutors. Be specific about it. Ask them whether they are comfortable, whether they have learned anything or whether they like how the tutor teaches. You need to make sure they are 100% comfortable and the tutor is 100% compatible.
Please change your tutor if you find him or her unsuitable for you or your child. This is best done early in the home tuition formulation as the benefits (or the lack of it) can snowball when time passes. Otherwise, you are just hiring a tutor for useless lessons, its ineffectiveness manifesting in result slips bloodied with red underlines.
Learn about 3 stages of Finding a Home Tuition...
4) Finding Last Minute Home Tuition
To quote a Chinese idiom verbatim: “Hugging the Buddha’s foot at the eleventh hour”.
It is not that last minute home tuition does not work. It might, it might not. The catch is that you have to hire the tallest breed of tutors who command an extraordinarily high price for their services. The highest rate for these elites can go up to $200/hour and you probably need to hire them more than is usual for home tuition, to acquire that miracle A. This will definitely burn a deep hole in your pocket.
And another pitfall Singaporeans make is that they still try to save money at this stage and hire a tutor that isn’t sufficiently skilled, say an undergraduate tutor. They pay the tuition fees and the student still gets a low grade. Money is burned but more importantly, they have staked away their child’s future.
Procrastination has a high price in home tuition. Hiring a home tutor early then loosens your budget while not compromising qualtiy
Find your Home Tutor Now!
5) Forcing Home Tuition on Your Child.
Inertia is perhaps the greatest obstacle parents must overcome in order to have an effective home tuition for their child. We understand that you know best for your child and that additional help is required to turn your child’s grades around. Nonetheless, there is only so much the tutor can do if your child refuses to learn. Even extrinsic motivations like sweets and toys would not help and everything that your child does for his home tuition might be ineffective.
How can you overcome this? Unless you are all for financial suicide, get a consensus from your child, please. The most important part of making home tuition effective is to remove that intrinsic resistance of your child towards home tuition.
You don’t have to make him love tuition or be motivated for it. Just make him not hate it, by showing him why he needs it.
6) Maybe Tuition is not the Solution
This is the hard truth. Read it again, and again, and again.
Home tuition has never been nor will it be a be-all and end-all for falling grades. It is there to either help the child learn better or to help him revise for his examination. And that is assuming the child needs help in the first place.
Diagnosing the crux of why one’s grades are falling is therefore essential to decide if home tuition is necessary. Maybe, your child is just lazy and refuses to do any revision. Or maybe, your child had made an accidental mistake in his exam, like putting the wrong question number that caused his bad grades. The reasons are innumerable and it is crucial to diagnose the root cause before planning the next course of action.
If he isn’t suffering from a lack of guidance, more guidance won’t improve his grades.
Avoid these 6 lethal mistakes in finding a home tuition. Or be prepared to have home tuition break your purse, burden your child’s education and levy undue academic stress on his delicate childhood.

At TuitionBean, we share with parents home tuition advice and other strategies to help them avoid all the common pitfalls of getting home tuition.
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