How My 17-Year-Old Prepping For One Of The World’s Hardest Exams Changed My Ideas About Teen Productivity
7:15 a.m. last Tuesday, I’m grabbing my lunch bag out of the fridge before work, and my 17-year-old son Liam has his beat-up $10 whiteboard propped between the cereal box and the coffee maker. He’s talking through slope-intercept form to a 13-year-old from two towns over over Zoom, his own 100-page IB Higher Level Math review binder splayed open next to his half-empty water bottle. He charges $10 an hour for these sessions, a quarter of what the local tutoring center charges, and he’s been doing three of them a week since January, right in the middle of prep for IB final exams—consistently ranked among the hardest high school exit exams in the world. When he first told me he wanted to add tutoring to his already full plate, I thought he was crazy. Now I’m the one taking notes.
When Liam signed up for the full IB diploma, every teacher and parent we talked to warned us: you don’t have time for anything extra. The exams cover two years of material, the grading is brutal, and even the most focused kids burn out if they don’t cut out non-essential activities. I nodded along, already mentally clearing his calendar of anything that wasn’t studying or weekly soccer practice. So when he came to me saying the mom of his teammate’s little brother couldn’t afford $60 an hour for algebra help, and he wanted to tutor the kid for cheap, I panicked. I pointed to the stack of past practice papers already on his desk. I asked him how he’d have time to study for his own exams if he was spending three hours a week helping someone else with middle school math. He just shrugged and said, “It won’t take away from anything. I promise.”
I counted his hours the first month to be sure. He was already waking up at 6 a.m. to do an hour of review before school, staying for two hours after school three days a week for group study sessions, and doing another two hours of practice at night. Three extra hours felt like a huge ask. I tried hinting a few times that he could cut back after mocks, that it was okay to prioritize himself right now. But he never took the hint. Then I started noticing small things I didn’t expect. After every tutoring session, he’d close his laptop, stretch, and turn to his own study material more focused than he’d been an hour before. One night he was stuck on a tricky integration concept for his own exam, complaining he couldn’t wrap his head around why the rule worked the way it did. The next day, he had a session with his 10th grade student, where he had to explain what the area under a curve actually means. After the session, he came into the living room where I was folding laundry and said, “Oh. I get it now. That makes so much sense.”
That’s when I stopped bugging him about cutting back. I’ve spent the last few months reading all the parenting content about exam prep, about how teens need to eliminate distractions and focus 100% on their big tests. But what Liam figured out on his own is that explaining a concept to someone else is one of the best ways to lock it into your own brain. I always thought that was just a generic study tip for classroom work, not something that could help with high-stakes exam prep. It’s also a great stress reset. When he’s been staring at a 12-mark practice question for 20 minutes and feels stuck, talking through a simple problem with a 13-year-old reminds him that math isn’t just about getting the perfect score on a hard exam. It’s about solving problems step by step, something he’d forgotten when he was stressing about his own grades.
This isn’t just a lesson for exam prep, either. I’ve talked to so many parents who are desperate for affordable math help for their kids, and they all think they need a certified professional tutor charging $50+ an hour to make a difference. But I’ve seen three different kids that Liam tutors make a full letter grade jump in the last three months, because he doesn’t talk down to them. He remembers what it felt like to mix up negative signs, to freeze up when the teacher calls on you, to think you’re just “bad at math.” He tells them when he got the same question wrong on his own test two years ago. That’s something a lot of expensive tutors don’t do, because it’s been decades since they struggled with middle school algebra.
If there’s anything concrete I can pass along to other parents, it’s two things. First, if your teen is prepping for a big exam, don’t automatically make them cut low-time, low-stakes activities that matter to them. Instead of issuing an ultimatum, ask them to track how they feel for two weeks: do they leave the activity feeling more focused, or more drained? If it’s less than five hours a week and it boosts their focus, it’s not a waste of time. Second, if you can’t afford pricey tutoring for your kid, look for responsible older teens who are strong in math and looking to earn a little extra cash. Most will charge a fraction of the rate, and they’re often a better fit for kids who are anxious about math.
Exams start in three weeks. Liam’s still doing his three one-hour sessions a week, still charging $10 an hour even when a parent offered to pay more last month. Some nights he goes to bed 15 minutes later than I’d like, but he still gets eight hours of sleep, still walks the dog for 10 minutes after dinner every night, still makes time to watch a bad action movie with his little sister on Fridays. We don’t know how he’ll score yet. He might get the 7 he needs on his math exam to get into the engineering program he wants, or he might not. No matter what happens, though, this semester has already taught both of us something I didn’t expect. I used to think doing well on a hard exam meant grinding 12 hours a day and cutting everything else out of your life. Now I think it’s just as much about figuring out what you need to keep in your life to keep going, even when everything feels heavy. That’s a lesson that’ll stick around long after the exam scores come out.
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