Why a Western Engineering Student Tutor Works For My Middle Schooler’s Math Anxiety
Last month, I found my 8th grader, Jax, crumpling his algebra quiz into a ball under the kitchen table at 7:42 on a Tuesday night. The red 58 at the top stared up at me, and I sighed, because I’d already been through this twice that semester. I’d tried helping him myself, but I couldn’t remember the difference between point-slope and slope-intercept form well enough to explain it without confusing both of us. We’d tried the big national tutoring chain downtown, where a nice recent ed grad walked him through workbook pages for an hour and a half every week, and Jax just stared out the window the whole time, his grade still stuck in the failing range. A mom from Jax’s soccer team texted me out of the blue that night: I have a kid in third year engineering at Western who tutors math and science out of his off-campus apartment, half what the chain charges. You should call him.
Liam showed up 10 minutes early to our first session, skateboard propped against our porch rail, wearing a faded Western engineering hoodie with a coffee stain on the cuff. He pulled a pack of spearmint gum out of his pocket and offered one to Jax, then noticed the Minecraft poster on Jax’s bedroom door and asked if he still did redstone builds. Ten minutes in, they were talking about the time Liam built a working 8-bit calculator in Minecraft for a high school project, and I forgot I was even in the room.
The first thing that caught me off guard was how little Liam acted like a “tutor.” The previous tutor would open with a strict lesson plan, work through three example problems, then assign five more for practice. Liam will start by asking Jax what problem he’s stuck on, then sit back and let Jax walk through what he’s tried already. When Jax gets stuck, he doesn’t jump in and show him the right step. Last week, Jax was staring at a rate word problem about two pipes filling a pool, and Liam just said, “Put it another way: if you’re collecting iron ingots for a new beacon on your server, and you get 12 an hour from one mine and 8 an hour from the other, how long does it take to get 100? It’s the exact same problem.” Jax sat there for 10 seconds, then smacked his forehead and said “oh, that’s it?” He solved it in two minutes after that.
I used to think that only a certified teacher could help a kid who’s struggling with math. I was worried an undergrad would just know the material himself but not know how to explain it. But I’ve been watching these sessions for two months now, and the difference is simpler than that. Liam struggles with math too, sometimes, right in front of Jax. Last month, he messed up a quadratic equation on the third try, laughed, and said “See? I always forget to carry the negative sign when I factor, that’s my dumb mistake. Let’s check that step again, what do you get here?” The old tutor never made a mistake, never got anything wrong, so when Jax messed up, he felt like he was the only person who couldn’t get this stupid stuff. Now he sees that even a guy who builds small robots for his engineering class messes up all the time, it’s not a big deal. It doesn’t mean you’re bad at math, it just means you need to back up one step.
If you’re a parent looking for tutoring right now, there’s three small things I’ve picked up from this that I wish someone had told me earlier. First, don’t rule out undergrads from local engineering programs just because they don’t have a teaching license. Most of them are looking for flexible side work to cover rent and textbooks, charge $20-$30 an hour instead of $80+ like the national chains, and they’re just a few years out from middle and high school math, so they remember exactly what trips kids up. Liam still talks about how he failed his first 9th grade algebra quiz because he mixed up the x and y axes, so he always points that out to kids before they make the same mistake. Most veteran teachers have forgotten that that’s even a thing kids get stuck on. Second, when you talk to a potential tutor, don’t ask for their GPA first. Ask them to tell you about a time they got a problem wrong recently, and how they worked through it. If they get awkward or act like they don’t mess up, move on. If they laugh and tell you a story, that’s your person. Third, ask the tutor to tie every concept back to whatever your kid actually cares about. It doesn’t have to be school related. If your kid loves soccer, rate problems become calculating how many goals a player is on pace to score this season. If they love content creation, exponential growth becomes how viral views build over time. It’s not dumbing down the material, it’s meeting them where they already are.
Jax got his last algebra test back two weeks ago, a B-. It’s not an A, and he still complains about math every night, and he still crumples up his homework when he gets a problem wrong. Last week, he even told me he still doesn’t like algebra much. But this time, when he crumpled it, he unfolded it a minute later and texted Liam a picture of the problem to ask about it at their next session. He doesn’t walk away anymore. That’s more than I ever thought we’d get right now, anyway. I still don’t know if he’ll ever love math, but he’s not scared of it anymore. And that’s enough for me.
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