Discovery of Tutoring Without Curriculum

In early 2018 I wrote an article about a student that I had, named Angela. She was about 12 years old, and doing bad in all subjects in her school in China. Her family was moving to Australia soon and they at least wanted her to improve her English. They had tried other private tutors without success. Through word-of-mouth they had heard about me, and wanted me to give it a try.

The parents said I could do anything, just improve her English. She wasn't interested in anything. She didn't care about anything. It took me a few sessions to convince her we could learn about anything she wanted. It doesn't matter what we study, because it'll be in English, since I only know English. Eventually she told me she's interested in dresses and fashion. I said we can learn about that together, because I don't know anything about it.

Her parents had previously discouraged and banned her from learning about dresses and fashion because they wanted her to focus on school: Chinese, English, math, history, science, etc. As we started to read about fashion I helped her understand how it's connected to everything. She needs to know about history, such as the silk road, to understand why silk is now made outside of China, and why Paris and Milan became fashion centers. She needs to learn geography to understand where these places are. She needs to understand agriculture and manufacturing to understand how materials are made. She needs to understand math to know how much fabric to have in a dress, and the cost of materials. She needs to be good at Chinese as it's an economic center of the world, and good at English as the trade language of the world. We learned what bespoke and haute couture meant together. In short, to really understand fashion and give herself the best chance of success in that industry in the future, she needs to know everything she can, with fashion as the center connecting piece of all her knowledge. Like a wheel, with fashion as the hub and everything else as spokes supporting the outside ring of her knowledge of the world.

She loved this. I found that most Chinese parents don't particularly communicate with teachers, but these parents did. They told me she started sitting down and waiting in front of the computer 15 minutes before our sessions. She asked for homework, and started writing essays on fashion. Her grades went up in all of her subjects in her Chinese school. All of this from this change of focus, and connecting that focus to other knowledge. I worked with her for a couple of months, then the family moved to Australia and I never heard from her again. I've been thinking about her amazing turnaround ever since. From a bad student uninterested in anything, to a student that was improving in everything, interested in everything, and focused on a personal passion. I now have an even better structure for using a student's interests, with parental approval, to develop the student's passions and classical rhetorical skills at the same time.

Here is part of that article from years ago:

"I teach for two companies. One is a behemoth with over 5,000 teachers. You are just a cog in a big wheel. The other is a startup that appears to be floundering a bit. There are some management, communication, and sales issues; that's basically everything. That value of the smaller company, which pays less, is that I can flex the lessons significantly more.

In the big company I get a student and some material and I have no say. For instance, yesterday I had 4 students that didn't like the book that they were assigned, which included the subjects of rockets, cats, hats, and some weird story about a plate. I try to transition away from the material as quickly as I can in those cases, but my options are limited. In the smaller company we just spend the session talking about things they like and things they might like to learn about until I find something. Often times that leads to remarkable results.

It's not uncommon for me to get students that are struggling in school. I do get some high achievers too, it's probably a normal distribution. One girl, Angela was having trouble in school and no one had had success with her in online lessons. I also had trouble with her for two lessons, I just couldn't get her to engage with any of the material I tried pulling up. So, the third session we just talked about what she would like to study. Many of the students are surprised when I do that and some of them don't know if they should really open up about it or not, but I ease them into it by regularly having my students ask me questions at the end of my classes. I do this with as many students as I can. Usually, they can't believe it. I've dumbfounded some, I've had others screech, I've had others act afraid. It's a bit unusual for a student to be able to ask any question they want of a teacher, apparently. It seems natural to me, but I'm not usually considered normal. I highly emphasize that it can be any question at all and give examples. I often have to explain how to ask a question, even to advanced students, because they never get to ask questions.

All of this leads to the students being more open to real discussion. I had done this a bit with Angela so that when we started talking about what she's actually interested in we were able to come to the subject of fashion design, which as it turns out is the only thing that she was interested in in this world. Over the next few weeks her parents reported to me that she was coming to sit in front of the computer early for class and just waiting for me. She was reading on her own, because I told her to read about fashion design, and she started asking if she could do writing as homework. I had been hinting for a number of sessions that she might want to write about fashion at some point. (Luckily I didn't have to know anything about fashion because I can just lean on the internet.)

Angela isn't the only case, I have four students with that company right now that I'm exploring alternative subjects with. Alex is learning about flowers. He was already a good student but now his enthusiasm is through the roof. And to get him access to his own learning materials I'm working with him on using the internet. Most of the internet is blocked in China, and Virtual Private Networks are illegal, so very little is available in English. China blocks the images on my blog, but they can still read the posts. Luckily, Yahoo Images and Simple Wikipedia are still available, those help a lot.

I have wide ranging discussions with Flora, who wants to learn everything about the United States. We've discussed everything from economics, to geography, historical politics, contemporary politics domestically and internationally, US economics, wedding traditions, colleges, the safety of the subway in New York City, the history of race relations, the average housing prices, and square footage of a house, and the average distance to grocery stores. These are not simple things to discuss. We also go over one or two pages of "Charlotte's Web" every class and focus on learning new definitions.

Jenny and I went over "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost word by word, line by line, stanza by stanza for a couple of weeks. Now we're working on "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe. That might take us months and it's pushing her ability to learn and my ability to teach. All of this because I asked her what she wanted to learn and she said she wanted to learn famous English poems.

Parker is a bit unusual because he's so young. Angela, Alex, Flora, and Jenny are all several years older. I tell him that I know the material is hard but that I also know he can do it. And I know he can do it because he's going to try hard, which is the key. See "The Culture Code" by Daniel Coyle and "Mindset" by Carol Dweck to find out how effective those little statements are. Sometimes I have a hard time remembering to use them enough, but you can see his posture change when I do. He's more focused, engaged, and confident."

Find more at JeffThinks.com or JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com