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Examination periods are the bane of every student and parent’s existence.
During this period, parents ramp up the frequency of their child’s tuition in order to polish up their weaker subjects.
Expectedly, most kids would whine and complain when faced with the idea of more tuition and less play time.
As parents, ensuring that your child receives the right amount of tuition is of utmost importance, but how can you determine how much tuition is too much or too less?
Your Child’s Needs
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In most cases, you would want longer tuition hours to help your kids on their weaker subjects.
However, it is important to note your child’s learning retention and attention span gets lower as the amount of content and workload increases.
Ever notice how your child seems so restless and inattentive during 3 hour lessons?
Research shows that the learning retention of students tends to be higher when they teach what they have learnt to someone else.
You can capitalize on this by reducing your child’s tuition workload by just a tiny fraction, and then get them to explain (or ‘teach’) their answers to you after tuition.
This not only effectively increases your child’s knowledge retention, but also ensures that they fully understand what they have learnt.
Maybe it can even foster his interest in teaching as a future career!
Intensity of Subjects
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Content-heavy subjects such as history and biology come packed with thick books, endless writing and notes, requiring the student to remember tons of info.
You will feel overwhelmed too if you must memorise both Stalin’s 5 Year Plan AND the Treaty of Versailles for a history exam!
Meanwhile, subjects like math are more application-based. Your child only needs to remember some basic equations (which may even be given to them during the exam) and how to use them.
For content-heavy subjects, the most effective, albeit difficult, way for students to study is to just spend time reading and memorising their notes during their free time.
They can then implement what they had memorised effectively during tuition and clarify any doubts with their tutor.
But for application-based subjects, practice makes perfect. As students encounter more questions, they would be more familiar with similar questions in the future and know how to tackle them.
So, a little extra math tuition wouldn’t hurt!
A Happy Child Is a Learning Child
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With all these said, it is important to make sure that your child gets enough rest and breaks from the stresses of homework and tuition.
For example, having tuition 3 times a week with one rest day in between 2 lessons would allow them to relax their mind, which in turn allows them to focus better during lessons and improves memory.
It would be a bad idea to enforce an overwhelming amount of tuition on your poor child, even if their grades may be the worst of the worst.
This would cause them to feel overly pressured, which may do them more harm than good.
Always ensure that your child can cope with the amount of tuition and homework. It is alright to put a little bit of pressure on them when it comes to exams, but also make sure that they are able to healthily destress.
While they might see tuition as a negative tool to attain good grades, it is important to encourage their desire to learn and develop in their own way. Let kids be kids!
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