Why I Tell Parents Not to Force One-on-One Tutoring

I'm going to tell you something that costs my own business money.

Don't force your kid into one-on-one tutoring.

Not because tutoring doesn't work. It does. But the results belong almost entirely to the kids who actually do the work, and no amount of money you spend converts an unwilling kid into a willing one.

Let me give you the case that made me sure of this.

One of our instructors had a student who came in with an ACT composite of 17. By his most recent sitting, he was at a 31.

He's the third boy in that family we've worked with. The oldest had a similar story, somewhere around a 16 up to a 31.

So what happened?

The honest answer is not what parents want it to be. It wasn't a technique. It wasn't a magic sequence of practice tests.

In the beginning it was, in his instructor's words, almost like pulling teeth. He wasn't lazy. He always did his work. He was overwhelmed, and he was discouraged, and those are different problems from lazy and they don't respond to the same pressure.

What changed was that he engaged. Once he did, everything the tutoring could offer had somewhere to land.

That's the whole mechanism. Preparation is a multiplier on effort. Multiply anything by zero and you still have zero, no matter how good the tutor is or how much the hour cost.

Which is why I'd rather you spend money on a motivated kid than on an unmotivated one, and why I'd rather you spend the month before you book anything getting your kid to want it.

Here's the version of this conversation I have constantly.

A parent tells me their kid needs tutoring. I ask whether the kid agrees. There's a pause. That pause is the answer, and it's the most useful piece of information in the entire conversation.

If your kid is in that pause, buying hours is premature. You are not solving the problem in front of you. You're purchasing the appearance of solving it, which is a very expensive kind of relief.

Deal with discouraged first. A kid who thinks he's bad at this and always will be is not going to be argued out of that position by his mother booking a tutor. He gets out of it by seeing a number move, even a little, and realizing the thing is not fixed.

Then buy the hours. Then they'll work.

And one more thing about that family, because it's the part I actually find encouraging. Three boys, three real jumps. Not because they were naturally gifted test takers. Because they were willing.

Willing is the variable. Everything else is technique.

Onward.

-Andy "Willing Is the Variable" Lockwood

P.S. Figuring out whether your kid is unmotivated or just discouraged is worth more than any prep package you could buy, and they look identical from the outside. We get into this kind of thing inside the Lockwood Inner Circle, alongside the rest of what we do for our private 1:1 college advisory clients. A dollar gets you in: lockwoodinnercircle.com