By Karen French

If you’re wondering about your child’s academic progress and if they’ve fallen behind in the “pandemic slide”, you are not alone.  Remote learning, hybrid models, shortened days, quarantines, and pandemic stress have reduced students’ academic hours across our nation.  But the question as to whether or not students have fallen “behind” is a loaded one.  Behind what?  Behind who?  Keep in mind standards, while aiming to create objective goals for all, will always carry a subjective element.  Learning standards that we assume are perfectly age-based are often not appropriate when thinking about learners on an individual level.  Regardless of your clarity for how behind your children might be, tutoring outside of school can help.

How Tutoring Can Help with Catch Up & More

Tutoring is one educational resource that can be tapped to address some of this lost time and simultaneously help kids grow individually, meeting them where they are right now.  Tutoring can leave standards in the background as a general timeline but not a lock step requirement of what and when.  In my experience, tutoring almost always helps learning happen more fluidly, less stressfully, and more effectively due to its individualized nature.  This is true in crisis times as well as in times we consider normal.  One-to-one attention surrounding content and skills with a highly qualified instructor that capitalizes on connection and joy to drive the learning process would arguably be an obvious win-win.

Tutoring provides an objective teacher without the same heartstrings and expectation pressures that mom and/or dad might offer and most often becomes a welcome routine for children of all ages when delivered with consistency. It is always customizable to the situation presented:

• certain subjects
• certain skills
• certain review
• certain pre-teaching
• certain deeping
• certain enriching, and more.

Tutoring can support and enrich any schooling model; private, public, home, and even pandemic interrupted.  It can blossom a slow to emerge reader or secure confidence in a middle school math student.  It can address learning differences like dyslexia or stop endless patterns of late assignments.  Tutoring can even be a simple supplement to busy working parents’ abilities to keep positive learning trends safe and continuous with an extra set of watchful eyes involved.  With consistency and the right level of frequency, parents who have used tutoring services have reported an elimination of that stressful child and parent interactions around schoolwork time and time again.  It’s one of those things many of our clients report as a “game changer” that they never want to let go!

Pandemic Losses, Gains & Kindness

Lastly, in considering how far behind your kids are in their education right now, include some kindness for yourself.  We’ve done the best we’ve been able to do.  And while there have been educational losses, they can be made up.  There have been gains too, some of those hidden blessings that some may have been lucky enough to experience this past year, for example more time playing outside, less scheduled activities, and more family dinners.  Of course these small hidden blessings could never outweigh the magnitude of the pain, fear, and loss the pandemic has brought to us.  I hope we will remember these losses to help us have gratitude for public and private education, teachers as absolutely essential, and those extra resources including tutoring that can help children thrive and find joy in their learning lives.

Contact us to get started with tutoring, homeschooling, or a virtual summer course!