Choosing a Chemistry Tutor for Your High Schooler: A Parent’s Guide
As parents, it’s always tough to see our children struggle with school. The teenage years are already hard, and it doesn’t help that the world is getting more competitive by the day. Setting the stage for a good career is crucial when kids are in high school, and STEM subjects are a popular choice to focus on.
Unfortunately, subjects like chemistry can be particularly dense, even if your kid is smart. It doesn’t help that the quality of teachers at school can be wildly inconsistent these days. Thus, getting your child the help they need can be truly helpful.
In this article, let us explore why you might want to hire a chemistry tutor and what factors to keep in mind. Let’s dive in.
Why Should You Hire a Chemistry Tutor?
Unlike middle school, high school is the time when more complex and abstract concepts and theories start being introduced. There is a clear transition from concrete ideas to more theoretical ones. For instance, there is an increased focus on atomic structure or molecular bonding.
Kids are suddenly expected to know how to draw an SF4 Lewis structure or explain electron configuration.
The biggest issue here is that there’s not a lot of time to really understand the concepts. Your kid needs to be able to grasp one concept before moving on to the next quickly.
As Proprep tells us, understanding the Lewis structure is often crucial to understanding bond angles. Similarly, bond angles end up being crucial to understanding molecular polarity, chemical reactivity, and more.
As we can see, these concepts are often related to one another, which adds to the complexity. If your kid didn’t understand the previous topic, they will often have trouble with newer, related topics as well. A tutor can help out with this and make it a whole lot easier to progress through high school chemistry.
Factors to Keep in Mind When Choosing a Tutor
Obviously, you don’t want to just choose a tutor at random. Hiring the right tutor is important because the last thing you want is for your kid to have two tutors that don’t make sense. To avoid such situations, let’s look at some of the factors you ought to keep in mind.
1. Excellent Communication Skills
Sometimes, you might find a tutor with a lot of experience and qualifications, but they fail terribly when it comes to communication. You can ask for a trial lesson and see how your child feels about their communication. Does the tutor make things easier to understand? Just about the same as school? Worse?
Remember, the whole point of getting a tutor is to be able to understand the subject with more clarity. There’s no point in wasting money on a tutor if they have poor communication and tutoring skills.
2. Familiarity With the High School Curriculum
Sometimes, even if you find a well-qualified tutor with some experience, their focus areas may not make for a good match. After all, different schools and regions tend to vary in their assessment methods and testing formats. This can also be an issue if you decide to take online lessons and the tutor lives far away.
Familiarity with the school’s syllabus will be critical, which is why it can be helpful to hire someone locally. They will have experience coaching other kids from the same school as your child. Moreover, they may be familiar with the school’s expectations and focus on topics accordingly.
3. Qualifications and Expertise
You want to ensure that the tutor is actually qualified to teach. A lot of people see tutoring as an easy way to make a side income. If you aren’t careful, your kid might end up with a tutor who’s not too serious about what they are doing.
Ensure that, at minimum, they hold a bachelor’s degree. (If you can find someone with a Master’s degree or even a Ph.D., even better.) Next, you want to find out if they have any prior tutoring experience. Along with tutoring experience, try to find out which ages they have primarily worked with and at what levels.
In conclusion, finding a good tutor is one of the best investments you can make for your child’s future.
Having a solid grasp and understanding of high school chemistry will make things much easier when they get to college. So many kids end up feeling overwhelmed with tough subjects when just a little extra help could make a world of difference.