What I Learned When My 17-Year-Old Tutored Math While Prepping For One Of The World’s Hardest Exams
It’s 8:15 on a rainy Sunday, I’m wiping peanut butter crumbs off the kitchen island, and my 17-year-old son’s phone won’t stop pinging. Three half-written STEP practice problems are spread across his side of the counter, a lukewarm mango energy drink sweats beside his notebook, and he’s typing faster than he’s working through calculus. I ask if it’s his exam prep group chat, and he looks up, glasses slipping down his nose, and says, “Nah. These are my tutoring kids.”
I’d forgotten he’d signed up to do this a month earlier. When he first mentioned tutoring a few kids from the high school down the road, I’d instantly tensed up. STEP, the Sixth Term Examination Paper required for entry to Cambridge math programs, is regularly ranked one of the hardest undergraduate entrance exams in the world. Every blog post, every teacher we talked to, said to clear his entire schedule of anything that wasn’t studying. Cut back on soccer, drop the after-school gaming club, focus only on practice problems. So when he said he wanted to add tutoring, charging only $10 an hour (less than a third of what most local college tutors charge), I thought it was a terrible idea.
I didn’t say no right away, though. He’d worked hard to get this far, so I told him we’d try it for a month and check in. Last week, I was folding laundry in the living room while he tutored a 16-year-old girl who was failing precalculus and panicking about her SAT math section. I expected him to rush through the session to get back to his own work, but instead I heard him walk her through slope not as some abstract “rise over run” rule, but as how much her phone battery drops per hour of TikTok use. The formula, he told her, is just a formal way to write what you already see happen every day. When she asked the same question about quadratic factoring three times, he didn’t sigh or rush her. He just started over with a different example, this time using how many points she’d score in a basketball game if she scored x number of three-pointers. When the session ended, she left holding a sheet of handwritten practice problems he’d scribbled out for her, and he turned back to a STEP proof he’d been stuck on for two days. Ten minutes later, he slammed his pencil down and yelled, “Oh! That’s what I got wrong.” Explaining factoring to her had made him see a wrong assumption he’d made about the base case in his own proof – something he’d missed staring at it for three hours the night before.
That moment changed how I thought about the whole thing. I’d bought into the idea that every extra activity takes away from exam prep, but what I’ve seen over the past month is that it’s actually adding to it. When I sat down and asked him why he wanted to do this anyway, he reminded me that when he was struggling with algebra 2 in 9th grade, we couldn’t afford more than one tutoring session a month. The tutor we found charged $75 an hour, and that ate up most of his extracurricular budget for the semester. He knows what it feels like to be stuck on a problem after school, with no one to ask, and too embarrassed to bother his teacher after class.
I’ve pulled three specific things out of this that I’ve been telling other parents I know with kids prepping for big exams. First, don’t automatically clear your kid’s schedule of all side activities just because they have a high-stakes test coming up. Instead of banning things, do a 10-minute check-in every Sunday night. Go over the week ahead, ask them how much time their side activity takes, and how it makes them feel after. My son schedules all his tutoring sessions right after lunch, when he’d normally zone out scrolling TikTok for an hour or two anyway. He says tutoring uses that dead time for something that feels good, instead of just wasting it. That works for him, and it hasn’t cut into his focused study time at all.
Second, if you’re looking for affordable math help for your own kid, stop skipping over upperclassmen. I’ve had so many parents tell me they can’t afford $80 to $100 an hour for a tutor, and I tell them to email the AP math teacher at your local high school. Most strong upperclassmen prepping for tough entrance exams are happy to tutor for cheap, because it helps them just as much as it helps your kid. They remember what it was like to struggle with algebra or precalc last year, so they explain it in a way that makes sense, not in the jargon a college professor who hasn’t taught high school math in a decade might use.
Third, don’t panic if your kid’s side gig isn’t some polished “resume-building” activity. A lot of people asked me if he’s doing this to look good for college, but he’s not. He’s doing it because it makes him feel good, and it makes his own studying feel less isolating. Prepping for a hard exam like STEP is a lonely thing – most kids at his school don’t even know what it is, so he spends most of his study time working alone. Tutoring lets him talk about math with someone else, and get a quick win when a kid tells him they passed their midterm. That keeps him from burning out way better than if he was just studying 12 hours a day alone.
We’re still three months out from the exam, and I still have my moments of worry. Last month, two of his kids needed extra sessions before midterms, and he missed a full set of his own practice problems. I brought it up gently, asked if he wanted to pause tutoring until after the exam, and he shook his head. He said the tutoring is the thing that reminds him why he likes math in the first place, not just getting a good score to get into college.
We don’t know how this is going to go. He might get the score he needs, he might not. There’s no perfect ending here. Last night, he got a text from that 16-year-old girl he tutored. She got a 600 on her SAT math, up 120 points from her last try, and she sent him a screenshot covered in confetti emojis. He showed me, grinned, wiped a bit of pasta sauce off his phone screen, and went back to his practice problem on the dining table. That’s where we are right now: taking it week by week, and learning that sometimes the best thing you can add to a hard exam prep schedule isn’t more study time. It’s something that lets you give back, and remember what you’re studying for in the first place.
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