What I Learned When My 17-Year-Old Prepping For One Of The World’s Hardest Exams Started Tutoring Math On The Side
It’s 7:15 on a Wednesday evening, and I’m wiping down the kitchen counter when I hear my son Jai’s voice through his closed bedroom door, slow and patient: “No, the slope is rise over run, not the other way around. Let’s draw it again, it’ll click.” Three years ago, when we first started talking about JEE Advanced—India’s notoriously competitive engineering entrance exam, widely ranked as one of the hardest standardized tests in the world—I pictured his 12th grade year looking very different: silent nights, a desk stacked with practice tests, no time for anything but cramming. Instead, right in the middle of the most intense prep period of his life, Jai is tutoring four local kids in math for $10 an hour, a quarter of what the big chain tutoring center down the road charges.
It started by accident last fall. A mom from our neighborhood parent group reached out asking if any high schooler could help her 7th grade son with pre-algebra. She’d lost her job a few months prior and couldn’t afford the going rate for private tutoring. I passed the message along to Jai, expecting him to say he didn’t have time. He said yes before I finished talking. I told him he didn’t have to do it for so cheap, he shrugged and said it’s more than he’d get working a weekend shift at the grocery store, and it’s way less hassle.
I was stressed about it at first. All the other parents in Jai’s prep cohort talk nonstop about single-minded focus. One mom told me last winter she made her son quit the school basketball team because it took three hours a week away from studying. “Every point counts,” she said. I’d internalized that too. I kept checking in with Jai, asking if he was staying up too late, if his practice test scores were slipping. For the first two months, everything stayed on track: he was still hitting his target scores on mocks, still getting 7 and a half hours of sleep most nights. Then, in March, he had a terrible mock: he scored 20 percentile points lower than his average, messed up three questions on differential calculus that he’d been getting right for months. I brought up cutting back on tutoring over dinner that night, braced for an argument.
He didn’t get defensive. He pulled out his practice test and pointed to the question he’d messed up: he’d mixed up the basic slope formula that he hadn’t thought about since 9th grade, which tripped him up on the derivative question. “That’s why I need to keep tutoring,” he said. “I haven’t thought about slope in years, but last week I had to explain it to Mia, the 10th grader I tutor. Now I’ll never mix it up again.” Instead of dropping tutoring, he just shifted his slots from weeknights after coaching to Saturday mornings, right after his daily run. That way, it doesn’t cut into his evening study time.
That moment changed how I think about teen exam prep. For years, I’ve bought into the idea that any activity that isn’t directly studying for the big exam is a distraction. But what I’ve seen with Jai is that small, low-stakes side work like this isn’t a distraction—it’s a tool. Explaining basic concepts to someone else forces him to pull apart what he knows and what he doesn’t, which is far more effective than just doing another 10 practice problems for his own test. It’s also a better mental break than scrolling Instagram or watching YouTube, which is what he used to do when he got tired of cramming. When he’s tutoring, he’s not thinking about his rank or what college he’ll get into. He’s just focused on helping one kid get a concept. It takes the pressure off.
I’ve talked to a few other parents who’ve had teens ask to do similar things while prepping for big exams, and I give them three concrete steps I’ve found work well. First, sit down with your teen and map out all their current commitments on a piece of paper together. Let them show you exactly where they’ll fit the new activity, and what they’re willing to cut to make space. Jai cut 30 minutes of unplanned scrolling after dinner and moved his weekly movie night to Sunday afternoon, so it didn’t eat into study time. Second, agree on a clear trial period and an exit plan. We did four weeks, and agreed that if he was consistently getting less than 7 hours of sleep or his mock scores dropped more than 10% and stayed there, he could cut back to one client a week or stop entirely. No shame, no “I told you so,” just a reset. Third, let them run the whole thing themselves. Jai sets his own prices, reschedules whenever he has a big test, and handles all communication with parents. That autonomy makes it feel like his choice, not another chore added to his list.
It’s still two months until the exam, and no one knows how it’ll go. Jai still has bad days where he leaves tutoring stressed and has to do an extra hour of practice to catch up. Some weeks he stays up 20 minutes later than he should to finish his own work after a tutoring session. But the 7th grader he started with just got a B on his last algebra test, after failing the first two of the year. The kid’s mom brought Jai a batch of chocolate chip cookies last week, and the kid drew him a math-themed doodle that says “best tutor ever.” Jai taped it to the side of his stack of JEE practice books. It’s messy, it’s not the perfectly focused exam prep schedule all the guidebooks talk about. But right now, it’s working for him. And that’s more than any of us could ask for, right now.
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