what tutoring has taught me about parenting

I want to begin this post with three anecdotes.

The first happened to me today. This semester for one of the subjects I’m tutoring, each class is divided into four teams for group work. At the first tutorial, I went around the room and gave every person a number between 1 and 4. In one of my classes, after two weeks, one team realised they had one too many people. That means that one of them would have forgotten their numbers and mistakenly joined their group, leaving another group one short. Now you wonder if this happened to you, the questions that you’d think you’d ask might be, “We’ve realised we have one too many and another team may now be disadvantaged. Should one of us join their team to make sure group work is balanced and fair in our class?”

Rather, the question that found its way to my inbox today was, “So you’ve put an extra person in our group. Are you going to mark us more harshly because we have more people?”

A friend of mine lecturing this semester explained to her students in the first week that they will have 5 essay questions in their final exam, from which they choose 3 to answer. One of her students raised her hand and asked if they will be given the questions before the exam. My friend replied, “Yes, of course I will” sarcastically, but to her shock, the joke was lost on her Masters students who genuinely believed that they would be spoon-fed in their advanced postgraduate degrees.

Lastly, in the previous semester, I tutored in a subject where two students had to give a presentation every week. When I sent a pair of students their great mark and feedback, one of them responded with a long dispute of my feedback and blamed the students in their class for being “stony-faced” and “unresponsive” as the reason why their presentation may have seemed any less than perfect. She furiously argued that she deserved the highest mark for their presentation.

On the surface level, these three anecdotes depict some common annoyances with a job I otherwise adore, but I think they also reveal something very sad about the way the values these students hold. I love students who have a thirst for knowledge and love to learn, but to hold academic achievement in the shallow form of grades above consideration and respect for others to me is appalling. I think a very simple way to avoid bringing up adults (my students are generally between 19 and 24 years old) who put how they are assessed above fairness, expect their teachers to do everything short of taking their assessments for them, or blame everyone else rather than accept their own shortcomings, is to maintain conversations with your children throughout high school and university and even Masters degrees and PhDs about what they are learning rather than the grade they received at the end of the year.

When children are rewarded only for the marks they receive, they learn that in order to gain your attention and encouragement, they need to get high grades at whatever costs, regardless if they really learnt anything. Unfortunately, this means that in university when group work and class discussions become assessable, these students perform badly because they don’t know how to suspend judgement, remain open-minded and exercise critical thinking skills. They just want to arrive at the ‘right’ answer as quickly as possible. In worst case scenarios, I’ve seen this erupt into aggression or descend into depression. But just having conversations with children regularly at home about what they are enjoying the most or finding the most interesting about their lessons, and rewarding them for applying effort, especially to challenging subjects that they are not naturally good at, I believe, will lead to happier adults who function better in university.