Read This Before Hiring a Math Tutor or Joining a Math Learning Program
As a parent, you recognize the value of a solid education in shaping your child's future. Some children may...
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Last Updated on February 25, 2022 by Thinkster
There’s a quote that you may have heard that goes, “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.”
The saying can apply to many different scenarios or activities — like sports, hobbies, professional growth, or academics.
What it ultimately means is that getting pushed out of your comfort zone is the key to success and reaching your full potential. When you work outside of your comfort zone, you quickly learn how to approach and tackle different types of problems. Experience is the best teacher. It can lead to a substantial amount of growth.
For your child to become highly successful academically, professionally, and in life, they need to be able to work through different types of problems. Math is great for this. It helps your child learn how to organize the mind to think and work efficiently.
Generally, you typically look for a math tutor to make sure that your child can reach their full potential. A private math tutor can give them the math education to understand and apply knowledge to different topics.
We get it.
We’re going to show you why this does not make much sense to hire a math tutor.
What???
Yep. Read on.
Here’s what to do instead to make your child a math champion!
In this article, we’re going to explain why you need more than just a math tutor to meet your child’s goal – you need a math coach.
We will explain why a coach goes beyond traditional math tutoring, and the additional skills they will give your child that will help them succeed. This not only includes lessons that they can apply for learning math, but also for many areas of their life.
We will then explain how you can find the best tutor to meet your child’s individual learning needs and goals. So read on if you are interested in learning more about the important distinction between math tutoring and math coaching.
Is there really a difference between a math tutor and a math coach?
A math tutor typically focuses on teaching your child how something works.
They typically focus on instruction and how to use steps and procedures. You might want math tutoring to teach your child math concepts such as linear algebra, calculus, geometry, and more.
Tutoring programs typically teach different ways of problem-solving and help your child understand concepts and concepts.
You may think about hiring a math tutor for a short-term goal. It could be that you purchase a few sessions to help your child prepare for a test. Or maybe you find a math tutor for a semester to help your child boost and improve their grades.
On the flip side, a coach does more and goes beyond.
They develop learning and life skills that have a profound impact on your child’s future.
While a tutor may help your child with 8th-grade math concepts they’re having trouble with, a coach helps with more.
Does a math coach tutor your child on concepts they’re having trouble with?
Yes… of course!
Do they train and instruct your child just as a math tutor does?
Yes… they do!
They also work with your child to help them become an incredible thinker.
The goal is to make your child a champion. So while a math coach is still a great tutor and math teacher, they go well beyond that as well.
When you think of the word ‘coach,’ you likely picture someone training an athlete. Even the very best athletes, like Roger Federer and Tiger Woods, have their own coaches!
This is because coaches offer powerful insight.
The way that you see your own performance is different from the lens that someone else uses to observe you. Coaches observe athletes so that they can give tips for performance improvements.
Sure, without a coach, Federer and Woods would be great athletes!
But with a coach, they tap into their full potential and are considered part of the world’s top athletes.
So why not hire a math coach for your child? If you want them to go well beyond the skills they need to excel in their courses, they will likely need a coach.
Even if your child is an A student and may be an algebra expert, there are other ways that they can take their performance and learning to the next level to make them a math champion.
For your child to be a math champion, they need to be able to think on their feet.
This applies not only to homework questions but also to problems with real-world examples.
Someday they’ll face problems in the workplace or life that require strong thinking and problem-solving skills to work through!
Not all types of problems are going to be procedural-based.
This is why your child must develop strong analytical, reasoning, and critical thinking skills. They need to be able to unpack problems and learn how to use different strategies when problem-solving.
If your child is a good problem solver, they are also good with self-analysis, pattern finding, introspection, and finding creative solutions and answers.
Your child should combine analytical and critical thinking skills with eagerness for innovation and creation.
Think about Steve Jobs and the way his mind worked.
He thought outside of the box to create the iPod — which led to a domino effect of innovations from Apple!
When your child can think creatively and non-linearly — meaning they don’t follow procedures — then they tap into skills that will make them highly successful in learning and life.
The basic idea is that it is great to understand concepts and topics, but the ability to adapt to apply your skills to learning new concepts as you go is even more valuable.
When your child is a champion, they are going to do incredible things!
Instead of being an observer or follower, they’ll become a leader.
Should they focus only on academic achievements and getting good grades?
No!
They should use their time to:
Even if your child has straight As, are they really performing at their best?
Your child needs to develop a multitude of skills to be highly successful in life,
To unlock their full potential, they first need to understand how to solve problems with different strategies. Then, they need to know how to think and propose different solutions to problems that they are going to face in the real world.
This helps them learn to develop the same mindset and thinking skills that great leaders have.
They also need to know how to react and overcome failure when the strategy or proposed solution does not work out as intended.
Many students fear failure as they see it as a sign of weakness. In actuality, though, failure is an incredibly powerful learning tool.
To become highly successful in life and a become a champion, your child should learn that moments of failure are not a bad thing.
Even the greatest sports champions lose matches!
The greatest inventors take multiple tries before they successfully create something new!
It’s how your child is able to learn from their mistakes to generate success that matters.
A great coach will teach your child that adversity and failure are not be feared. In fact, they are necessary steps to mastering something.
A coach will help math students to not be discouraged by failure, but to get motivated by it to achieve greater success.
Sure, a math tutor may help your child boost their grades.
But they don’t typically help your child improve other learning and life skills.
A coach wants more than just to help your child increase their grades. They focus on the skills that will help them outside of academics. The skills that will really help them succeed in anything they try.
There are many skills that a coach can help your child develop! Here are five examples that our Thinkster Math coaches help with:
For your child to be incredibly successful academically, professionally, and in life, they must have strong critical thinking skills.
It’s the ability to look at a variety of problems from different lenses in order to propose solutions.
This also requires thinking strategically!
Thinking strategically isthe ability to link and form bonds between different thoughts and ideas.
It’s the ability to think and process carefully.
As you might imagine, these skills are incredibly adaptive. By learning to think in this way, your child will have an approach to solve any academic, professional, or real-life problems.
Your child’s math coach should work through these skills with a variety of problem types, especially ones with real-world examples!
You can’t innovate or think non-linearly without the ability to unpack problems – which is why developing and nurturing these skills is so important!
Organizational skills don’t just refer to learning how to plan activities based on how much time you have.
It also means learning to organize the mind to work productively.
Your child needs to learn and understand how to measure the effort required to complete a task.
Thinkster coaches work with your child through learning plan organization, topic reflection, and review. They also hold discussions so that your child learns to understand and interpret their own proficiencies.
If you look at highly successful people or millionaires, they all possess the skills to self-reflect and organize their minds carefully!
You can check out more on how our coaches really help your child develop strong organizational skills.
Having strong communication skills doesn’t just mean your child is a great public speaker. It’s also the ability to effectively interact with different groups of people.
It could be through conversation, phone calls, emails, or messages. The way that your child addresses or speaks to their friends is very different than the way they will address their future employer!
A math coach can help your child learn how to segment and organize the different types of communication.
They also help your child learn how to frame and ask questions when they need help.
Instead of just saying, “I don’t get this,” your child learns to shape questions to better communicate the specific reasons they need assistance. Your child’s coach also ensures that your child understands how to communicate politely and kindly.
By properly framing their questions, your child will learn to fully evaluate a situation before asking for help. They are able to communicate their needs better, and their coach can help them to communicate and articulate their thoughts better.
Self-awareness is a learned skill that every math champion possesses!
To start, a Thinkster coach works with your child to examine their proficiencies. The goal is for your child not to think that being weak in a particular skill makes them a weak student or a failure! Instead, the coach works with them to see those areas as ones that can work on to improve their performance.
A coach also helps students recognize they need help and understand how and when to ask for help.
Because asking for help isn’t a sign of weakness either!
Even the greatest athletes know when to ask their coaches for help to improve their performance!
Your child should also develop this mindset so they can be on the path to becoming a true math champion.
These are just a few of the many areas a coach helps your child make incredible improvements — in addition to their math performance, of course!
Finally, through achievement and through recognition of the above factors, your child will gain the confidence necessary to become a champion!
Confidence is gained by prolonged exposure to success. But success doesn’t mean that you will become immediately successful at everything you try.
A coach will teach your child that hard work, dedication, and commitment will result in success over time. Your child will learn what it takes to become a champion, which will give them the confidence necessary to get there.
At the end of the day, online math tutoring can only get you so far. It is great for building knowledge for standardized tests and homework, but continued work with a coach will give your child the skills necessary to take it beyond that.
Prolonged exposure to this type of approach results in confidence, and that is what your child will take with them into college, their career, and beyond!
If we can make every student a champion and ready for life, the rate at which innovation and creation happen will rapidly increase.
A math champion has all the skills needed to do incredible things — like finding a cure for cancer, making drinking water safe and accessible, or extending the viability of fruits and vegetables.
These are the sort of things that make a real difference and the world a better place.
Your child should start working on developing compassion to help others, along with the thinking skills and motivation to make improvements.
When you look for math help for your child, don’t have the solitary goal of improving your child’s grades.
Instead of spending money on tutoring services or hunting for a math tutor, look for the opportunity to elevate your child’s thinking.
This helps them become ready for life and armed with math skills and a variety of other important skills.
A math coach can help your child unlock and reach full potential!
They strengthen skills that can get your child into an Ivy League school, become a millionaire, or become highly successful in life!
Our Thinkster Math coaches are excited to help your child prepare for the future and make incredible learning and thinking improvements.
Our coaches design a custom learning plan for your child and observe your child’s performance — every day of the week! This allows them to work with your child daily to reorganize learning efforts and problem-solving strategies.
Your child taps into their full potential and becomes a math champion when they’re a Thinkster!
Learn more about our rockstar math coaches and what sets them apart from typical math tutors.
At the end of the day, what a “champion” is depends on your child and their goals. Every child will have a different circumstance that will make them feel like a champion, and Thinkster will work with them to get them there!
