Parenting with a difference 101: A home teacher, for what?

Picking a home teacher for your child like any other thing you do for him/her must be done discretely. Don’t just pick any teacher.

You must know the teaching philosophy of the person you are hiring. Is s/he a LIBERATOR or captor.

The liberator is one who coaches the child to become independent in the long run. Such a teacher guides the child with questions etc that breaks the challenge they are tackle into bites and pieces until they are able to solve it.

When this is done for some time the child naturally develops the ability to tackle problems on their own with little or no supervision. The liberator teacher says,’ do it and let me check.’

While the captor is one who keeps the child dependant on him/her all the time. This kind of a teacher does the exercise the child is do, for him/her, not allowing the child to do the thinking required of them, hence not helping them to be as strong in the mind as can be. The captor teacher says,’ let me do it for you to copy.’

You also have to be careful because the one you pick can destroy your child’s love for learning. Due to wrong use of pedagogy. Learning is difficult because of its requirements but it is more so if the facilitator doesn’t use the right kind of methods to impact knowledge. Age specific, examination friendly i.e less time-consuming , enjoyable and related methods.

When you hire someone who doesn’t see anything wrong with examination malpractice, you are headed for trouble. It is not enough for the child to be able to solve questions, understand concepts they must be morally upright too.

The teacher is key in influencing good moral aptitude in the child.

You just can’t take chances, on the issues of impacting knowledge to your child[ren]. One misstep can spell doom for their educational journey, which would most definitely affect their life after school.

Why employ a home teacher?

To support school work

To make child move ahead of school work

To help child with homework

Now let’s discuss the above points, one after the other.

To support school work, it is absolutely crucial to have a clear purpose and/or target for the teacher.

You then ask teacher to give you plan on how the target can be achieved. With that you would have set a clear path for monitoring his/her progress, which would very likely lead ultimately to success of your child.

If you can’t do it personally engage somebody to do it for you at a fee so that it would be done professionally – by that I mean someone who would analyse your wards results and pick out relevant areas that need invention. This could be from subjects down to topic specifics. Your child deserves it.

Time is precious and scarce so is money both must be used strategically to benefit us immensely.

As for making the child move ahead of the class the purpose is quite clear from the onset. What remains is to call on the persons you hire to give you a clear plan on how that can be executed.

So, that, you can use it to monitor that progress or otherwise for the work been done. Aside, payment of the fee agreed on, you must find a way of monitoring the importance of that cannot be overemphasised.

Your money and time – if for good reason you can’t fulfil the time obligation delegate it to a trusted person, please don’t leave everything to the teacher.

There are exceptional teachers who would do it all for you, but your personal involvement in things to do with you ward gives it the needed impetus to blossom.

Employing someone to be helping your child with homework is the most dangerous thing to if handled with care. In some few instances homework is meant to give pupils/students a preview into what next they are going to do or treat. Homework is mainly given as a recap of what was done in class during the day’s lesson.

It serves as a source of feedback to the teacher, parents/guardians and school authorities.

It is therefore to be done by the pupil/student who it is/was given to. It is not supposed to be done by anybody else, not the homework teacher, not the senior sibling, not the parent, not the mate but the one it was given to.

They can be supported and/or supervised, but primarily they mustn’t be spoon-fed in anyway shape or form. If they have to be spoon-fed on homework regularly, the problem is deeper than the homework. It could be that s/he didn’t understand what the teacher taught or s/he didn’t pay attention in class and so struggles with homework once a while.

However, if s/he regularly struggles, there is a fundamental lack of understanding of concepts, largely due to foundational gaps. Therefore the home teacher employed, must be made to focus on filling the gaps, rather than spending precious time do homework which in principle isn’t his/hers and will also not help in the upward mobility of the child.

At this stage helping with the homework alone will not make the needed impact, as that way of tackling the challenge is liken to putting bandage on a sour that requires surgery. If focus is not changed from helping with homework to ‘catch up sessions’ the gap will even widen the more.

The following are the negative consequences of doing the child’s homework for him/her on the child.

• Doing for the child’s what they are must to do for themselves, serves to make them weak. You can guide or support but don’t do it for them. When you chew meat that is meant for the child because it hard, so you try to soften it for them, they will lose out on the initial sweetness in the meat and the teeth doesn’t get to be strengthened.

Learning to walk is not easy for kids but nobody does it for them. The reason is if you want to do it for them then they will never walk. This must be applied to doing homework.

• The child will not see the need to pay attention in class during lessons that is, tantamount to money down the drain.

• It makes them irresponsible they take the glory for good marks from work

done and quickly push the blame for work that doesn’t go well.

• To do the child’s work for him/her is strictly speaking cheating. So in trying to solve one problem we end up creating another one, which is even more dangerous.

• The feedback to the school is not entirely true, the not therefore put in the right position to give a good prescription for the child’s development.

• The fundamental issue – which is a gap in his/her educational foundation - with the child is not dealt with comprehensively.

• Behaviour issues – like being disrespectful towards authority, disturbing in class picking up quarrels, becoming recluse and so on - arise when they are not aided to become more independent as quickly as possible.

Obviously, it is not about throwing money at the problem/challenge. You can hire a home teacher and further compound the issues that the child faces, if it is not tackled the right way my dear parent or guardian. I have heard parents complain severally when the issue of poor performance is raised about their child, ‘I have bought all the materials is needed, engaged a home teacher and s/he doesn’t do any chores in the house. So I don’t know his/her problem or what s/he wants me to do again.’ There is obviously more to it, dear parent.

If ever want to employ a teacher to support your ward with homework lay the following ground rules.

Under no circumstance should the homework be done or solved by the teacher for the child to copy.

The child should solve it first before the home teacher, comes with intervention.

Be categorical that anytime your child fails to do the homework ahead of his/her visit s/he should not get involved i.e s/he should not even look at the questions.

The home teacher should report to you consistent failure to submit homework done for his/her vetting and further direction – be it approval or correction. This will enable you ascertain whether it is lack of understanding from school or it is just out of sheer laziness.

Often times the teachers, parents, siblings etc who do/solve the homework for children to copy, do so to save time. It takes time to supervise an unwilling or a struggling child do all his/her homework. So they end up solving it quickly and leaving the child to copy into their books, to enable them, attend to other things. In some extreme cases they actually work the solutions in the child’s book with their handwriting [pure spoon feeding]. The effect is far reaching on the child in the long run.

We should do all we have to polish up the child’s thinking level, from LOTS [ Lower Order Thinking Skills] to HOTS [Higher Order Thinking Skills] that cannot be achieved if we do not train them to apply/use their thinking faculty regularly. Don’t be the cause of your wards stagnation, because of lack of due diligence.

May Almighty God make it easy for us.

Rayhann Shaban Parent – Child Relationship Coach Lead Education Advocate Development Networks [ ADN ] rayhannshaban@hotmail.com adnworkss@gmail.com 0243414669 / 0200225235