How Different Children React To Private Tuition

This is a series of articles about different children and how they react to private tuition. Slightly tongue in cheek, but based on years of experience with lots of students. All likeness to students past and present is probably coincidental...

This is from a series of articles I wrote about how children react to private tuition, depending on their personalities as much as their particular needs. In thi excerpt, I look at Brian and Maisie, fictional children who are very different from one another.

Brian

Brian is a quiet, serious boy, verging on the introverted. At home, he can be a giggling tornado of energy - or at least, he used to be when he was nine. Now he prefers safer pursuits, like video gaming, playing the home DJ kit, poring over his stats on that mysterious website he set up last week.

What Brian doesn`t want is a home tutor. He is intelligent and knows what he needs in life and where he has to go to get it. He`s aware of his shortcomings but already works around them. Why try to learn more now, when he has all his plans in place?

Brian can be the hardest student of all. He is clever, he knows a lot of things, even if he won`t share them with you. He is often gifted in certain areas and has a complete disinterest in learning about subjects which don`t interest him.

Brian is the sort of child who will do everything a tutor tells him to do. A lot will go on under the surface, but on the top of it all, he is a calm pond, not a ripple to show for his seething resentment at having his spare time bitten into every week with pointless extra work.

Brian will always do what he needs to in life and you shouldn`t worry too much about him. The same determination he shows in his spare time pursuits will be applied to the world of work when he`s older. Eventually, he may realise how much the extra learning has helped him but I doubt he would ever say it was time well spent.

Maisie

As a direct contrast to Brian, we have Maisie. She`s a sweet little girl who makes friends easily and will be happy to do what she`s asked. She might have to be told a few times before she understands as the world of Maisie is full of butterflies, flowers, light music and the shiny trim on her dress. There is just so much else to think about, nice things that don`t mean doing work, that Maisie finds it hard to keep up at school.

When Maisie grows up, she`ll drift almost magically into a job where she deals with people every day. She`s going to make them feel better, doing something that society at large doesn`t see as very important. While Brian is solving the issue of plate-retrieval at light-speed rates, Maisie will be putting her hand on someone else`s, as they tell her what colour flowers they want.

Or as Brian orders online so he can finish his deal-breaking project in time and buy a second home in France, Maisie will have forgotten to pay her gas bill because she stopped to talk to the old woman at the bus stop who couldn`t seem to sort out her purse.

Maisies need tuition because school work is secondary to life. They are rare creatures, already aware of what is important - other people. They may frustrate and confound parents and teachers with their inability to remember how to spell key words, but the room is always brighter with them in it.

It should be mentioned that alongside all this prettiness is a streak of determination which makes everything else come together. Maisie will learn, if she really has to, but will then go on and do her own thing anyway.

What she has in common with Brian is a knowledge of where she is in the world and what she has to do to make it her own. Brian could explain this in words, if he tried. Maisie goes ahead and does it without explanation.