Guest Post: Problems with Parents

This is a great guest post sent to us by a tutor who wishes to remain anonymous. It is all about dealing with the difficult parents of a tutee.
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Hi readers,

I've decided to submit this post anonymously for obvious reasons (I don't want to get involved in the parents reading this, etc.). It is a post that deals with the reality of tutoring high school mathematics, and the pitfalls that come with a teens difficult parents.

My tale starts out like any normal tutoring session. I showed up at my tutee's home, a nice suburban brick house, on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

I rang the bell and a tired looking 16 year old girl, I'll call her June (name obviously changed), answered the door. After making my way inside, we sat down and went through the usual introductions. I found out that she played volleyball, which she enjoyed, and that she was very worried about her algebra grade.

Unfortunately, during this 10 minute conversation, June's parents interrupted about 5 times. Not to introduce themselves, or offer some insight into their daughter's difficulties with her math class, but to remind her to "study fast - you have practice in 2 hours."

I was shocked and knew that there was a definite problem.

Throughout our hour long session, we were interrupted repeatedly, at least a dozen times, by June's parents.

June's mom stopped the session twice to ask about volleyball equipment, her dad interrupted us to talk about the upcoming game in 3 weeks, and there were other interruptions that ranged from carpool questions to discussions about "gearing up for the scouts that might be at the game next month."

By the end of the tutoring session June looked as frustrated as I felt and it was clear that nothing had been accomplished during the session.

I knew that we had 9 more tutoring sessions planned, but I also knew that they would be useless if the tutoring session conditions stayed the same. So I started thinking about what to do next.

Should I talk to the parents and risk confrontation? Should I suggest we meet elsewhere? I didn't want to create any tension or uneasiness, I just wanted to give June a chance to learn.

So, after a few minutes of though, I mustered up the courage to talk to her mom and dad. I let them know that June definitely needed help with her algebra, but that she was a bright young woman who seemed very capable of quickly learning the concepts.

I also asked if it would be all right to move our future tutoring sessions to the local library so that we would have access to all of the math books we could possibly need and a quiet place to study.

To my relief, June's parents said that library tutoring sessions would be fine with them, provided that they could be scheduled around practice and games. I was thrilled - I knew that we would have a much better chance of math class success if June was given an opportunity to concentrate.

So, for the next session June and I met after school at her local public library. The session went great, June picked up all of the concepts we went over, and by the end of the semester she had improved by an entire letter grade!

Now that she will be entering her Junior year of high school, we have planned regular tutoring sessions at the library. June is still a star volleyball player, but now she is a star math student as well!