What Happens When a Busy Teacher Says Yes to Extra Lessons
The bell had gone, and most of the class were already halfway to the door, shoving their worksheets into backpacks and shouting about some video game. I was still at my desk, trying to sort through the pile of maths tests that had been sitting in my bag for two days, when Henry came up to the front. He stood there for a moment, shifting his weight, then asked quietly if I could go over fractions with him. He had missed a couple of lessons because of the flu, and he was falling behind the rest of the table.
I looked at the tests. I looked at my planner, which was already full for the week – a department meeting, a parent evening, and a stack of marking that seemed to reproduce overnight. Then I looked at Henry, who was holding his pencil case like a lifeline. And I said yes. I told him to come in ten minutes early on Thursday, before school started.
That was the first mistake. Not saying yes, but agreeing to a time I had no real room for. Thursday morning I was already awake at six, trying to remember if I had any clean pens, and I had a stack of homework to skim before my first class. When Henry arrived at 8:20, I had not eaten anything, and my coffee was going cold.
We sat at the back table, the one with the cracked plastic tray and a lost pencil case from 2019. Henry pulled out his workbook, and I pulled out a set of fraction strips – those coloured bars that show halves and quarters and eighths. I had used them a hundred times, but this morning they felt like props in a play I hadn’t rehearsed.
I asked him to show me what he remembered about putting halves together. He paused, then lined up two of the orange strips and said that made a whole one. Okay. That part was fine. Then I asked him what one quarter plus one half was, and he stared at the strips like they were foreign currency. He knew the answer was something, but he didn’t know how to get there.
It took twenty minutes. It was not a neat, beautiful lesson. Henry got frustrated, and he said he was stupid – that’s what he said, quietly, with his head down. I hated that. I said, no, you’re not stupid, but I didn’t say anything else for a moment because I was trying to figure out how to explain it without just telling him. We tried using the strips to make a common denominator, but he kept forgetting which piece was which. Then I tried a different angle. I flipped his workbook over and drew two simple pizzas – one cut into four slices, one cut into two slices. I shaded one slice of the first and one slice of the second, and I asked him which slices he would want if he were hungry. He pointed to the half. Then we could actually talk about why.
By the time the bell rang, Henry had solved the problem himself, with a little help. He wrote the steps in his book and looked almost surprised. I told him to do the next two practice questions at home and bring them to me if he got stuck. He nodded, but he was already thinking about breakfast. I was too.
That extra lesson taught me something, but maybe not what you would expect. It wasn’t that I should always say yes, or that teachers should sacrifice their mornings for every struggling student. I think we both did actually learn something important. But I also learned that the way I had handled it – agreeing to a prep-less morning slot with no buffer, no food, and a load of other work pressing on me – was not a plan. It was a guilt trip.
So I tried something different the next time. Another student, a girl named Priya, asked for help with long division after school. I had a parent meeting at four, and I knew the meeting often ran over. Instead of saying yes to “just a few minutes”, I said, “I can do fifteen minutes right now, but then I have to leave, and we’ll need to pause when the bell rings. Would that still work?” She said yes. We used a mini-whiteboard, and I set a timer on my phone. When it went off, I stopped mid-sentence and told her we’d finish tomorrow at the same time. She didn’t seem annoyed. She actually appreciated knowing the boundary.
That was the real insight: extra lessons don’t have to be these huge, open-ended commitments. They can be as simple as a ten-minute chunk, but the chunk needs to be real – not squeezed between other things and then rushed. What matters is that the child gets a predictable window where you are not looking at your watch or thinking about the marking pile. That sounds obvious, but it took me half a term to actually decide that fifteen solid minutes with my phone on silent was worth more than forty distracted minutes.
I also started using a different phrase. Instead of saying “Do you get it?”, which almost always gets a yes, even from a child who is completely lost, I started saying “Show me what you remember from what we just did.” That changes the task. A child has to reconstruct the idea, not just tell you what you want to hear. Henry, for example, when I asked him that later, drew a picture of the two pizzas and said “you have to make the slices the same size first.” That was more useful than any number of “I get it” replies.
There is a reason teachers and parents have guilty consciences about this. We all know that some children need a little extra time, and we want to be the person who gives it. But there is no point offering a help session if you are too exhausted to actually help. That sounds like a self-care slogan, but it’s practical. I have had sessions where I was so distracted by the pile of tests that I gave the wrong example, and the child left more confused than they arrived. That is worse than not having the session at all.
The other thing I learned is that extra lessons do not need to happen in the classroom. For some children, just moving to a different place can lower their anxiety. I have sat with a student in the library, on a bench outside, even in the empty art room once, because that room had a large wall clock and a table that was not covered in my own paperwork. The change of scenery seemed to help them focus. Or maybe it helped me focus, because I was not staring at the stack of tests every time I lifted my head.
I still offer extra lessons when I am busy. I think I will always do that, because there is a particular moment when a child finally gets something – that little “oh” when their eyes go wide and they suddenly see how the numbers fit together. It is worth a lot. But I have stopped offering them in the way I did before. I schedule them at a time that I can honour, even if it means the child has to wait a day or two. I tell parents clearly: “We’ll do a short session on Friday, and if it’s not enough, we can decide what to do next.” I give myself a time limit, and I stick to it. That sounds like it would make things cold or rushed, but it actually makes the session more focused, because both of us know that we have thirty minutes and we need to use them well.
Henry came back after a few weeks with a test that had a B on it. He had still made one mistake, but it was a careless one – he had written six eighths instead of three quarters, then crossed it out. He showed it to me with a strange kind of pride. I said, “That’s great progress.” He shrugged and said, “It’s only a B.” I didn’t give him a speech about how a B is amazing. I just said, “It’s better than last time, and you know why you got it wrong.” He nodded. Then he went off to play football.
I still have that pile of tests. It’s a different pile now, but it’s still there. I have not found the perfect system, and I don’t think there is one. Extra lessons are not something you can schedule around all the other demands of teaching – they are something you do on the edge of the day, sometimes while you are still holding your coffee cup and thinking about the next meeting. But I have learned that it is okay to offer a little help, as long as I also offer it honestly. A child would rather hear “I can give you ten minutes, but not right now” than sit with someone who is already mentally elsewhere. And I would rather be the teacher who says that than the one who pretends, for a nervous kid holding a pencil case, that there is all the time in the world when there isn’t.
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