Offering tutoring and homework help: things to know before you start

Home help is a profession that is highly sought after by families. Busy working hours and other commitments outside the home often keep parents away from their children during the hours immediately after returning from school, when it is time for many of them to go home. Even students who work well on their own still need some structure and guidance, not to mention struggling students.

This is why someone who offers them private lessons or homework help can become a great helper to improve their school performance and assist them in the afternoon while their parents are still away.

Depending on the grade, the homework help service can be organized in different ways and respond to multiple needs.

In the case of boys and girls who attend primary school, homework help can also overlap with a babysitting service. For teenage boys and girls, on the other hand, homework help may require more in-depth school knowledge, especially in particularly difficult subjects.

In this article we will see what the differences are between the tutoring service and the homework help service and what you need to know before you start offering this service.

While they may seem like two similar services, tutoring and homework help aren’t the same thing. There are substantial differences based on several elements that we will now analyze. Knowing this difference will help you to better define the service you offer and how to properly promote it.

Already the word repetitions contains a clue to the specificity of this service.

Giving repetitions means helping the student to recover gaps or strengthen knowledge in a specific subject of his course of study.
We are talking above all about students of the last years of middle school or high school .

The tutoring service consists of reviewing the school curriculum of a subject in which the pupil is not particularly strong.

It can be a cycle of private lessons with a calendar of variable length : a few weeks (perhaps in view of a question or a decisive class assignment), a few months or the whole school year. As for the hourly commitment, you will decide it with the student or his / her family, based on his or her school recovery needs.

Since giving repetitions implies following the ministerial program and the topics covered by the teacher in class, if you offer this service you will have to adapt to the material that the student will propose to you. Your job will be very similar to that of a remedial teacher for a particular subject.

Depending on the level of the program, you may feel comfortable proposing a tutoring service for more than one subject.
It is common, for example, to propose the combination of mathematics + physics for students of scientific high schools or schools. techniques, or Latin + Greek for classical students.

Before offering a tutoring service on multiple subjects, however, make sure you actually have the necessary preparation to delve into even the most complicated meanders of the topics covered by the student in class.

Homework help means a learning support service for elementary or middle school students .

This is an accompaniment to the study of multiple subjects , aimed at helping the student with the homework assigned by the teacher.

This means that you will need to be able to assist the student with their math homework but also with those of grammar, history or geography. You will also have to help him / her study with the assistant or read and repeat the lesson, if requested by the teacher.

Compared to repetitions, you will work with younger students who follow a lower educational path . This makes the job less demanding in terms of training and you don’t need to have in-depth knowledge of a particular subject.

The homework help differs from repetitions also for the daily commitment. Usually, in fact, families require a daily homework help service , to accompany the student in the afternoon until the parents return.

When dealing with younger students, though, you will probably have to contend with a more elusive level of attention or some minor discipline problem. For this reason, often a homework assistant professional also has babysitting experience and knows how to manage communication with children.

Before you jump into the homework help service, let’s give you some tips to better structure your offer and get started on the right foot right away.

If it is true that homework help does not usually require a thorough knowledge of school subjects, it is also true that a quick review will not hurt you. Above all, if you do not feel comfortable with certain subjects it is good that you specify it immediately.

Normally, you just need to take a look at the school books used by the student to understand the level of difficulty of her homework. But remember that it is always about training young students – it is imperative that your priority is to help them study and do their homework completely correctly.

As we have seen, offering a homework help service also involves a lot of patience and the ability to communicate effectively with elementary school children or a little older.

Having previous experience as a babysitter or in childhood education will help you a lot in managing their lack of attention, distractions or the desire to take a break to play.

Any experience you have about it, highlight it because it will be valuable.

The amount of hours to devote to homework help depends on the needs of the child and his / her family: as we have seen, it is usually a daily commitment of variable duration but concentrated in the afternoon.

So try to clear your calendar so that it will be available in the afternoon. To make your profile even more attractive, specify your availability at flexible hours that allow you to better adapt to the student’s weekly commitments.

In order to offer a homework help service, it is important to understand the difference with the tutoring service first of all. Once you have decided which service to focus on, try to highlight the three most important elements for the student and her family:

Have a nice job!