Offering Extra Lessons While Extremely Busy: What I Learned as a Teacher
It was 7:42 on a Tuesday night, and I was sitting at the kitchen table with a red pen in one hand and a cold cup of tea in the other. My own daughter was in the bath, yelling that she couldn’t find her towel. My phone buzzed. A parent from my class: “Hi Ms. R, sorry to bother you. Aiden is really struggling with fractions. Is there any way you could do extra lessons before the test next week?”
I typed “Of course” before I thought about the stack of report cards due Friday, the IEP meeting in the morning, or the fact that I hadn’t eaten dinner. I told her I could stay after school three days that week. She was grateful. I felt useful. Then I looked at the clock and realized I still had nineteen narrative reports to write.
The next afternoon, Aiden showed up at my classroom door at 3:15. I had promised him a focused lesson. In reality, I was printing a worksheet while answering an email about a field trip and half-listening to him explain that his soccer practice started at 4:00. I handed him a page of fraction problems. He stared at it. “Do I have to do all of these?” he asked. I said yes, but my voice was already somewhere else. I was thinking about the email, the report cards, the towel, the fact that my own kid had been late to school twice that week.
We spent forty minutes that afternoon, but maybe ten of them were real teaching. The rest was me managing papers, checking my phone, and trying to remember which step he kept missing. Aiden left with a completed worksheet and, I suspect, very little new understanding. The next day, he got the same kind of problem wrong. I felt a familiar pinch of guilt.
I’ve been teaching long enough to know that offering extra lessons while extremely busy is not a noble act by default. Sometimes it’s just a rushed version of help. The student gets a tired adult and a vague sense of being a burden. The teacher gets one more item on a list that was already too long. The parent gets reassurance, but not always progress.
That week, I started paying attention to what actually made a difference. Not the long after-school sessions. The short, specific ones. On Thursday, I had exactly fifteen minutes between a meeting and pickup. I didn’t print anything. I grabbed a small whiteboard and said, “Aiden, we’re only doing one thing today: finding common denominators. That’s it.” I set a timer for ten minutes. He did four problems. I watched his hand, not my phone. When he got stuck, I asked, “What’s the first thing you notice about these two denominators?” He said, “One is three, one is four.” I said, “So what could both of them turn into?” He said, “Twelve?” We did two more. The timer went off. He looked surprised. “That’s it?” he asked. “That’s it,” I said. The next day, he got three out of four right on the warm-up.
I’m not saying ten-minute lessons are magic. They’re not. But they’re honest. They fit into a real schedule. They don’t pretend that a tired teacher can deliver a full hour of instruction after a full day of teaching.
If you’re a parent who has ever offered to tutor your own child after a long day, you probably know the same trap. You sit down at 8:00 p.m., determined to help with reading or multiplication. You’re already thinking about laundry, emails, tomorrow’s lunch. Your child senses it. They stall. You get short. The lesson becomes a fight about attention rather than a lesson about the skill. Then you both feel bad.
The fix isn’t to never help. It’s to make the help smaller and more concrete. What has worked for me, both as a teacher and as a parent who has tried to tutor at the kitchen table while the pasta water boiled over, is to name the exact skill before we start. “Extra lessons” is too big. “We will practice borrowing across zeros in subtraction” is doable. Write it on a sticky note. When you finish, throw the sticky note away. That’s the lesson. Don’t add a second skill because you feel like you should.
Cap the time before you start. Ten minutes for a younger child, fifteen for an older one. Use a visual timer or phone timer. When it rings, stop. Even if you’re mid-problem. This teaches the child that help has a shape and an end. It also protects you from turning a quick review into an hour of resentment.
Use one material. A whiteboard, a single index card, or three problems on scrap paper. Worksheets with thirty problems invite fatigue. I’ve had more success with four carefully chosen problems than a whole packet. If the child needs more practice, they can do five more tomorrow. The point is to leave the session with a small win, not a completed page.
Put your phone in another room. This is hard. I know. But if you’re going to give ten minutes, give ten actual minutes. Children notice the difference between a parent who is present and a parent who is physically there but mentally answering email. If you can’t put the phone away, don’t start the lesson. Say, “I want to help you with this, but I’m not free until 7:30. Can we do it then?” That’s better
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