I Said Yes to Extra Lessons on a Week I Had No Business Doing It
The last bell had rung, and I was already three tasks deep into a mental list: grade twenty-four lab reports, pick up my own son from soccer, and somehow find time to eat something that wasn’t a granola bar. Then Marcus appeared at my classroom door, backpack half-zipped, shifting his weight from foot to foot.
“Miss, could we go over the chapter test? I got a fifty-two, and I really need to bring this grade up before the quarter ends.”
I opened my mouth to say, “Can we do lunch tomorrow instead?” But his face was doing that thing—the careful, trying-not-to-hope expression twelve-year-olds get when they’ve already braced for a no. So I heard myself say, “Sure. Can you come in after school Thursday?”
He nodded, relieved, and I immediately felt a knot tighten in my stomach. Thursday was the worst possible day. I had a parent-teacher conference at 3:30, a department meeting at 4:15, and a stack of papers that was reproducing overnight. But the words were already out, so I put it in my calendar and decided I’d figure it out.
The rest of the week collapsed into the usual chaos. Wednesday night I was up late cutting out vocabulary card games—that real teacher life, laminating and all—and I kept thinking about Thursday. I had maybe forty minutes to give Marcus, and I knew the material cold. Why did this feel so heavy?
I think I knew the answer. The heaviness wasn’t the time. It was the feeling that I was about to do something half-heartedly, and Marcus deserved better than that.
—
On Thursday, I shaved my planning period down to a split-second bathroom break and rearranged my conference schedule. When Marcus walked in, I had six wrong-answer patterns spread out across two desks and a plan to hit them one by one. For about eight minutes, it worked. He mastered two problems about fractions on a coordinate plane, and I felt that familiar click of a kid getting it.
Then my phone buzzed. The front office needed a signature for a field trip form I’d forgotten.
“Hold on, I’ll be right back,” I said. I ran to the office, signed the form, and came back in three minutes. But three minutes was enough. Marcus had picked up the stamped eraser I’d left on the desk and was pressed into a chair that was tilted way back—both classic off-task signals I’d seen a thousand times.
I wanted to sigh. Instead, I sat down next to him and said, “Alright, show me what you got from those first two problems. Teach it back to me.”
He did—haltingly at first, then more fluently. And I realized something important: that moment, that “teach it back” step, was the actual point. Not my beautiful error-analysis system. Not the coverage of all six patterns. The point was giving him enough time and attention to get one or two concepts into his own working brain.
We fixed the eraser thing by moving it to my desk and putting him at a table with nothing on it. We got through two more problem types. He left at 4:10 with a tutorial video link saved on his Chromebook and a promise that he’d try the first three homework problems that night and send me a photo if he got stuck.
I sat down, ate a sad sandwich, and thought about what had just happened.
—
Here’s the thing about offering extra help when you’re stretched thin: your instinct is to say yes only when it’s convenient, but that’s not how kids ask for help. They ask when the need is real, which is often exactly when you’re overbooked. And refusing feels terrible, but so does doing a bad job of helping.
What I’ve learned is that the quality of extra lessons depends way less on my energy level than on a few small moves I can control even when I’m running on fumes.
First, decide what you’re actually offering. When Marcus asked to “go over the test,” that could mean anything from retaking the whole unit to comforting him about a bad grade. I assumed he wanted everything, and that assumption made me exhausted. Once I said, “We’ve got thirty minutes—let’s work on the three topics you missed most and then make a plan for the rest,” the whole session got easier.
I’ve also stopped treating extra help like it has to be back-to-back drills. One of the most useful sessions I ever had with a struggling student was when I was so tired I just didn’t have the energy for worksheets. I said, “Honestly, I’m exhausted today. You tell me what YOU think the hardest part was, and we’ll start there.” He talked for ten minutes about how the coordinate plane confused him because the x-axis and y-axis looked like a plus sign, and he kept mixing up left/right and up/down. I had no idea he was stuck on the basic vocabulary of the graph, and I had spent three afternoons before that trying to reteach him the formulas.
Asking the kid to be the diagnostician is practical guidance for any busy adult. You don’t need to know the exact gap ahead of time. Just ask: “If we fix one thing today, what should it be?” The student’s answer is almost always accurate.
Another thing that works: controlling the environment before the session starts. The eraser, the chair, the phone buzzing, the papers on the table—those aren’t incidental. Every loose object on a teaching table is a magnet for a kid who’s nervous about not understanding something. I now clear the surface, put my phone on do not disturb, and hand the student a specific tool (highlighter, whiteboard marker, or sticky notes) so they know what we’re using. It’s low-friction and magical.
And I’ve stopped promising more than I can give. That Thursday, I was tempted to say “We’ll do two more problems and then I’ll send you some extra practice” when I knew I had to leave in fifteen minutes. Instead, I set the boundary out loud: “We have time for one more problem, Marcus, and then I want you to try three on your own. Send me a photo if you need help, and I’ll carve time tomorrow.” The kid left knowing the plan. And he did send me the photo that night. We fixed one thing over text, and in class the next day he raised his hand for the first time in a week.
—
But I’d be lying if I said it all resolved neatly. Marcus is still behind. He still forgets his materials and looks embarrassed when he pulls out crumpled homework. The extra lessons didn’t transform him into an A student. What they did was reconnect us, and that connection is what made him willing to try again. That’s not a neat ending—it’s just a true one.
I still don’t know the perfect way to help kids when I’m drowning in my own list of tasks. Most days, I just pick the least-bad option: the session where I’m present for forty minutes, clear about the limits, and honest that I’m tired too. And I trust that being honest is part of the lesson as well.
If a child asks for extra lessons and you’re overwhelmed, you don’t have to refuse, and you don’t have to overgive. You can say yes to one small, focused hour. You can turn off your phone, clear the space, and ask them what they need to fix. It doesn’t fix everything. But it does more than you’d think—and sometimes, it does enough.
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