What I Learned When My 17-Year-Old Tutored Cheap Math While Prepping For One Of The World’s Hardest Exams
It’s 8:15 on a Tuesday, and I’m scraping spaghetti sauce off plates when my 17-year-old Jax closes his Zoom laptop and shoves it aside to make room for a half-finished STEP practice paper. His half-eaten granola bar leaves crumbs all over the table, and there’s a ring from his iced coffee staining the corner of the answer sheet. The second student he tutored tonight just signed off, and he already has his pencil out, flipping to question 3.
“Three hours of tutoring for thirty bucks,” I say, nodding at his notebook. “Don’t you think this is crazy with your exam six weeks out? All the prep guides say cut out every extra thing right now.”
He looks up, erases a line of working, and says, “C’mon, Mom. Explaining slope intercept to a 14-year-old is the best prep I could do. If I can’t explain it to her, I don’t actually get it, right?”
Three months ago, Jax was stuck. He’s applying to study math at Cambridge, and STEP—Sixth Term Examination Paper, the test they require—is widely considered one of the hardest undergraduate admissions exams in the world. He’d been working through practice sets for two months, but he kept hitting the same wall with complicated integration, getting the same wrong answers over and over, and coming out of study sessions frustrated and tired.
A friend of his who tutored A-level math suggested he advertise cheap sessions to local high school kids who couldn’t afford the $60 to $80 an hour that most private tutors charge around here. Jax posted in our neighborhood parent group, said $10 an hour for math help up to 12th grade, flexible evening hours, and got five requests in two days. I was immediately nervous. I’d spent weeks reading all the parent threads about exam prep: every spare minute counts, cut out part-time jobs, cut out extra clubs, focus only on the test. I sat him down at dinner that week to talk about it, told him I was proud he wanted to help people, but this wasn’t the time.
He just shrugged and said he’d only do three evenings a week, max two hours each, and if his practice scores dropped he’d quit. What did he have to lose?
What I didn’t expect was how quickly things turned around. I started noticing that when Jax prepped for his tutoring sessions, he went back over basics he’d blown off in his own prep. He’d assumed he understood the fundamentals of differentiation, for example, because he could solve the hardest STEP problems, but when he had to explain why the chain rule works to a 10th grader who just couldn’t wrap her head around it, he realized he’d only ever memorized the steps, not actually internalized why it works. That gap was what was throwing him off on the more complex integration problems he’d been stuck on.
Last month, he spent 20 minutes walking a sophomore through how to break a big word problem into smaller, solvable chunks. That night, he sat down to a STEP problem he’d been staring at for three days, and realized he’d been doing the exact thing his student was doing—trying to solve the whole thing at once instead of splitting it up. He solved it in 10 minutes.
I’ve talked to so many parents over the last year who panic when their teen has any commitment outside of exam prep. We’ve all bought into the idea that every minute not spent studying is a minute wasted. But Jax’s experience taught me something concrete that I’ve started passing on to other parents I know: if your teen is prepping for a big exam, don’t automatically make them cut out side work related to what they’re studying. Instead of jumping in and telling them to quit, ask three quick questions: Does this take less than five hours a week total? Is it work that has them explaining or practicing the subject they’re studying for? And do they say they feel more refreshed after doing it than they do after a whole afternoon of just doing their own practice problems? If the answer to all three is yes, let them keep it.
It doesn’t even have to be paid tutoring. If there’s no tutoring opportunity, suggest they spend an hour a week quizzing a younger sibling on the basics, or meet up with a classmate who’s struggling and walk them through concepts they’ve already mastered. The act of teaching forces you to pull information out of your head and rearrange it, which is way more effective than just doing another set of practice problems when your brain is already tired.
Jax charges $10 an hour on purpose, by the way. When people message him asking if he’ll raise his rate for more advanced help, he says no. He told me that when he was in 8th grade, we had a year where my husband was out of work, and he was struggling with pre-algebra, and we couldn’t afford a tutor. A senior at our high school volunteered to help him once a week after school for free, and that turned him around from failing to getting A’s by the end of the year. He says he just wants other kids who can’t afford fancy tutors to have the same shot.
Two weeks out from his exam now, Jax’s practice test scores are up 14% from where they were three months ago, before he started tutoring. He still burns toast most mornings, still forgets to fold his laundry, still spends 15 minutes scrolling cat videos after each tutoring session before he gets back to his own work. I still catch myself biting my tongue sometimes, wanting to tell him to skip a session this week to cram more. But he says it’s fine, and so far, he’s been right.
We don’t know how he’ll do on exam day. It’s still one of the hardest exams out there, and even with all the prep, there’s no guarantee he’ll get the score he needs. He says if it doesn’t work out, he’ll reapply next year, and keep tutoring in the meantime. Right now, this is working for him, and that’s enough for me.
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