Sarah Habtemariam

I have many reasons for loving what I do. Helping students achieve their potential, adapting to kids’ individual needs, building lasting relationships based on shared goals—these are all good reasons to become a tutor. But I’ve recently become aware of another incredible quality of tutoring: it blends several compelling endeavors into something bigger and more rewarding.Tutoring merges education and what is usually called “enrichment.” For some reason, enrichment activities are increasingly seen as trivial or excessive. Our culture’s efforts to improve education through more rigorous standards and efficiency have detracted from the richness of our students’ education. A good tutor can help counteract these forces by infusing lessons with a wider sense of context and humanity. A tutor can combine subjects in interdisciplinary projects, incorporate the student’s interests and creativity, stay constantly attuned to the student’s self-image, and model a broader conception of learning that involves all of our senses, exploration, tolerance, and dialogue. The proximate goal may still be to raise the student’s grade from a B to an A, but the process can be richly constructed to get at something deeper.