Q&A with Joe Norman on The Super Tutor - on his top 7 essential and imaginative lessons, and lifelong learning

[BojanaMumsnet]

Hello

As we head towards the exam season (solidarity), we’re pleased to announce a Q&A with Joe Norman, who’s recently published the book The Super Tutor.

Joe has been a tutor of children aged 10 - 13 for fifteen years. Joe shares his top seven essential and imaginative lessons in the book, including: how to write, how to read, common mistakes and how to think. His publishers say: “Stripping away grades, praise, university places or examiners, this book celebrates the love of learning things for their own sake.”

Joe says: “The contents of this book are largely things I was taught 20-25 years ago, which are still available to me now, because they stayed with me. Most of the quotations are made from memory. That’s the only real criterion for inclusion. Do I still remember it decades later?”

Read more about the book and see a preview on Amazon.

Please post your questions for Joe here by noon on Friday - we’ll collect them and send them over on Friday afternoon. Responses will be posted back on Wednesday 24 April.

Please bear in mind our webchat guidelines (though this won’t be a live webchat!)

Thanks
MNHQ

@Wisefox

Hello Joe. I'm writing as a private tutor and as someone who of course pays close attention to the education system and the curriculum. I teach children who take a bit longer to pick things up, or are easily distracted and, children who usually have one on one assistance in school. My question is: do you have any advice for teaching children who find school quite difficult? Not all of them suffer low confidence but they are frequently reluctant, or lose the motivation, to push themselves. A few find themselves getting angry or teary when it comes to homework- I've had it reported to me from their parents. I wish it were a simple case of giving easier homework but often the homework isn't particularly challenging at all.

Thank you for offering us this opportunity.

Hi Wisefox,

Nice to hear from a fellow tutor – it’s not as collegiate a job as teaching in a school. It sounds like you’re doing the most important thing right when you say below that ‘we move at the child’s pace’. Exactly, and that’s maybe the main advantage of tutoring over teaching. I’ve learned to change the subject every 15 minutes if needed – no-one learns much if they’re bored out of their mind. The educationalist Alfred Whitehead said that the three stages of learning are 1. Romance, 2. Precision and 3. Generalisation. You’ve got to have the Romance stage – something that’s just fascinating, that you want to understand better – before you get to the next two.

That fascination needs to exist for the tutor, too, I think. I try to only teach stuff I’m interested in – when you talk about how ‘the homework isn’t particularly challenging at all’, it sounds like you might be a bit bored. Boredom is catching. So is enthusiasm – but it’s impossible to fake for any amount of time, so try to pick subjects you love, and material you enjoy reading again and again. I suppose I try to choose texts that are understandable by the student, with a little help, but which are still rich enough that I get something out of my twentieth reading.

And I try to make it relevant to them. Whatever subject I’ve been hired to teach, I always ask my students about their favourite books, and take five minutes every lesson to chat about what they’re reading now, so I can make a couple of suggestions for what they might enjoy next. Reading for pleasure is absolutely the most important thing any student of any age should be doing – what is less important – because it cures so many problems in lots of areas. But they should have the final choice of what they read, and be free to give up on lots of books (I know I do) before they find one that really grabs them. And as with reading, so with writing: you can often get a really good paragraph out of a student if you simply ask them what happens next in a story they’re already gripped by. If all else fails I ask students to write a newspaper match report about their favourite team.

Finally, try not to make assumptions about your students’ interests or abilities because of certain weaknesses they may have. I had a dyslexic student who (fair enough) didn’t want to write anything for me, but who got really into the American poets we looked at together for fun (Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams), and by the end he could read and discuss them quite brilliantly. Tutors shouldn’t just be paramedics patching up our students’ weaknesses, though that’s invariably what worried parents are asking for. We ought to work on their strengths and enthusiasms, too, wherever possible.

@Wisefox

I've also heard that the topics that are covered within primary schools are crucial for necessary life-skills e.g. telling the time, counting money, rounding numbers, mental maths etc. I don't disagree but, I wonder why then it's that such learning isn't stressed in primary schools.

There is no strict but informal testing on such skills before the child learns new, more advanced topics, in his next year. I imagine that you probably have your own list of concerns regarding the education system, but how do you personally ensure the children you tutor have reached the necessary checkpoints before moving forward? Assessments are, of course, one thing but in primary schools particularly these aren't very frequent. They also mean less time for new topics. With the children I tutor, I take care to ensure we move at the child's pace. This often means going incredibly slowly. How can one incorporate a slow pace and covering all necessary topics?

Dear Wisefox,

On testing, I’m with Einstein: ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ I think this is particularly true in the assessment of students’ writing ability, which is very hard to usefully quantify through the nationally-mandated tests, but it’s perhaps the most important thing they’ll learn at school (and continue to hone afterwards).

For that reason I tend to wince a bit at phrases like ‘assessments’ and ‘necessary checkpoints’, because I don’t think education should be a single racecourse that everyone runs in the same order so we can see at the finishing line who has won and who has lost. Obviously we are where we are – perhaps our job would not exist if not for these tests – so we have to do our best to help our students with them. But while I’m tutoring I always in the back of my mind have the thought: is there a more interesting way I could be explaining this?

@Mummyxiannubrownie

Hello Joe,

My 13 year old son has read your book and he loved it. He thought it was very useful as he is currently preparing for his scholarship exams.

He would like to know whether you have any tips re revision notes / revising before the exams ?

Also, do you have any tips for the interview ?

Thank you.

Hi Mummyxiannubrownie

And thank you. What a nice message. It’s especially heartening to me because he’ll be the first person to use the lessons in the book for their original purpose.

The Super Tutor is meant for everyone, it's for curious adults and hard-pressed students of all ages. It’s a pretty general guide to the kind of academic/ intellectual education you get at the oldest/ cleverest/ priciest schools in England, and I wrote it to be general enough so it’s useful to GCSE and A-Level and first year university students.

But most of the stuff in the book came out of my work preparing candidates for these incredibly difficult (and brilliantly eccentric) scholarship exams that the top public schools set for 13 year olds like your son (the girls’ private schools’ exams are usually taken at 11).

I think the main thing is for him to read loads of 13+ scholarship past papers – they’re very available on the schools’ websites – from several different schools, so he can get a sense of what’s expected from him when he sits that one schools’ exams. Because each school’s papers are written and marked by the teachers there, and when you’ve read enough of them, you can get a sense of that school’s personality from the kinds of questions its teachers pose – and of the qualities those examiners are looking for in successful candidates. I’d also hugely encourage any interested adults to take a look at these papers. Maybe start with subjects you liked at school, and bear in mind this should be fun, not daunting.

After the reading comes the thinking, and your candidate’s remaining afternoons could be spent daydreaming about the most interesting essay question he read that morning. Scribbling down loads of 6-12 word essay plans is probably the next step, or heavily annotating an English exam so that he’s got lots to say for the high mark questions.

And on a more pastoral note, I think it’s important that all of you keep in mind that the chances of success are pretty slim. The numbers might stack up to a 1 in 3 chance, or a 1 in 5 chance, but the key factor is that the standard of the competition will be incredibly high. Most of them will have been prepared (as the name would suggest) by a half-dozen prep schools with a specialised 1-2 year syllabus delivered by expert teachers. But a talented outsider always has a chance if he can familiarise himself with as many of the past papers as possible, and get a bit of constructive feedback on the many practice essays he writes.

Possibly the best thing he can do is to approach these exams with a mindset that – scholarship or not – testing himself against the very highest standards will have been a profoundly worthwhile exercise. This might be the month that he decides what degree subject he wants to study when he’s 18, and 13+ scholarship exams are undoubtedly an excellent preparation for the Oxbridge exams should he go down that road.

Finally, as far as interviews are concerned, I always ask my students to remember the first rule of showbusiness: 'Look 'em in the eye, and speak from the heart.'

Please wish him the very best of luck for me.

@AspergersMum

"As an overall top ranked lifter, it is Joe's squat that has made him renowned as one of the most powerful squatters in the sport." Wow Joe, that is amazing! Or your amazon page might need a tweak, one of the two.....

Hi AspergersMum

Thanks for the (amusing) heads-up - have fixed.

@OmallyCat

Do you have any tips on grade disappointment? How do I avoid DS1 giving up on his favourite subjects because he had a run of bad results?

Hi OmallyCat

I’ve been in this situation before. The only ‘B’ I got at GCSE was in English, which was my favourite subject, but I felt it spoiled all the ‘A’s, and told my English teacher I didn’t want to take the A-Level. He just laughed and told me not to be ridiculous.

A degree, and 15 years’ (mostly) English tutoring later, it turns out he was right. Whether he saw in me a talent for his subject, or a passion for it, isn’t really important, because as you get older, you realise that these two things are basically the same, and that exam grades aren't always the most reliable way of measuring them.

On the other hand, I’m in favour of students giving up subjects, and extra-curricular activities, as long as it means that energy goes into other intellectual or creative or sporting enthusiasms. He’ll at any rate have to pick just one subject when he’s 18 and off to university/ art school/ etc. This whittling-down process lasts years and can be painful; but it’s also a pretty important part of his education for him to start knowing his own mind, and to be free to act on it.

Goodbye all,

And thanks for your brilliant questions: sorry I didn’t answer all of them, and also sorry for blethering on at such length for some of the ones I did.