One of my jobs is at a tutoring center, and I work with a group of highly opinionated teenagers (and those are just my coworkers! ). In general, most of them are fairly mature and outgoing, but one thing some of them do kind of bothers me-
Several coworkers seem to press their personal agendas onto the kids they are tutoring. For example, one coworker is a vegetarian, but she is very preachy about it, and is talking about wrong it is to eat animals. I don’t have a problem with vegetarians at all, but I figure, “If you don’t bother me about what I eat, I won’t bother you about what you eat” in a live-and-let-live kind of sense. I feel like when they talk to kids like this, they are taking away any ability for the child to make a rational decision. I was talking to my best friend about this the other day, and I told him how I would rather see a child come up with a good decision because he or she thought it out themselves, and didn’t have an opinion simply based on what a tutor/teacher/authority figure told them to believe.
Absolutely not, and I think that sort of thing could very well get your company in trouble with certain parents. It’s vegetarianism now, but what if a month later one of your tutors is saying “now before we talk about your trig homework, let’s talk about Jesus.”
It’s not even about the children making decisions for themselves, it’s about the fact that they’re not going to a tutoring center to be preached at (except about their trig homework).
Must be nice, having all this extra time to yap about vegetarianism or whatever. I work as a tutor, and I barely have time to get through all of the scheduled tasks to engage in idle chatter.
What the hell subject are they tutoring that they think this is acceptable behaviour in the classroom? If its maths or similar, this sort of thing shouldn’t be coming up in the classroom at all. If its sociology or religious education then the tutor has a duty to provide balance, not preach.
The parents are paying for extra school help for their children, not for some stranger to discuss the pros and cons of their personal beliefs.
Shame on your co-workers. They are extremely unprofessional. If I found out my tutor was wasting 20 minutes of time discussing the health benefits of tofu and bean sprouts instead of helping my child understand the quadratic equation and the beauty that is the Cartesian co-ordinate system, I would be highly put-out.
This has nothing to do with depriving a child of the ability to make a rational decision. The tutors are on the clock to teach, not to preach.
The way the tutoring center is organized is by having 24 computers running special tutoring software that the kids (ages 4-14) work on. Each tutor supervises about 6 kids in their ‘group’, helping them with questions and keeping their enthusiasm up. Members come in on a ‘drop in basis’, and each child does an about hour’s worth of tutoring broken up into five ten-minute lessons. Some days it is quiet in the center, with fewer children present, so sometimes the tutors have brief conversations with the children. This can be useful in order to get the children enthusasitic about their work, and help them become comfortable around the tutors. However, some of the newer tutors (such as Ms. Vegetarian) aren’t quite yet keen on what is and is not appropriate to talk about. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have had a coworker do this- a year ago there was another coworker who told kids that it was George W. Bush’s fault paid her such low wages, and that she feels his administration is taking too much of her paycheck in Federal taxes (Never mind the fact that in CA, Minimum Wage is higher than virtually anywhere else in the US, or the fact that most of the taxes she complains about get refunded to her in April :rolleyes: )
You and other dopers made a good point that parents aren’t paying us to preach to their kids (which is true). The point I was trying to make is that the children at the center look to us as role models. They are taught to trust that what we say is correct (since we are helping them master concepts that they are learning in school). When a tutor says a jagged statement to a child like, “Meat is murder”, or “Democrats are commies”, their statements will often be interpreted to the children as facts, as infallable to them as 1+1=2. Whenever I have a child ask me a question like “Does God exist?” or “Why do people fight wars?” I encourage them to research and find out in the library, because you often will learn a bunch of other neat things on the way to answering your own question These questions often stem from them reading a passage in a lesson, or wondering why they have to solve a problem a certain way.
I cannot understand in what context your fellow tutors would think such inflammatory claims are appropriate. You are handling it the right way, by encouraging the children to seek the answers on their own.
It’s like when my children ask me what a word means. Most times I point to the dictionary.
One year in college, I worked in an elementary school garden, teaching kids about ecology, biology, and so forth. It was pretty fun, and very interesting to watch how the kids interacted with each other and with myself.
One girl, about nine, one day brought me a couple issues of The Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witness magazine, that offered the JW take on environmentalism. She told me her mother thought I might like them, and asked me if I wanted more.
I thanked her but politely refused, but when she asked me why, I didn’t give a straightforward answer. What do y’all think about such a situation?
Obviously, a tutor shouldn’t go around spouting his own religious/political beliefs; how should a tutor respond to a student who does so, especially a young student who may have no concept that it’s inappropriate?
). In general, most of them are fairly mature and outgoing, but one thing some of them do kind of bothers me-
These questions often stem from them reading a passage in a lesson, or wondering why they have to solve a problem a certain way.