On Monday I learned that Future Particle Physicist has been lying to my face for weeks about his homework.
He often tells me that he “doesn’t have” homework in a particular subject, or that his teacher gave the students time to work on it during class and already he handed it in. Now that I have access to his gradebook (the wonders of the internet, none of this stuff even remotely existed 6 years ago when I was in school) I can see that this is a bunch of crap. (In my defense, I had always been suspicious of these claims but was wary of the return on investment I’d get by challenging him aggressively on it.)
When I first realized this I got pretty annoyed. Tutoring Future Particle Physicist is the easiest the job I have, which actually makes it one of my least favorites. FPP is a good kid (or so I thought) and I generally enjoy working with him, but there is no challenge to it whatsoever. Working with him just serves as the most poignant reminder of how much I am underachieving in my life right now. My job is basically to make sure he does his homework. So when I found out that he had been lying to me and basically making me a failure at the easiest job I’ve ever had, I was more than a little annoyed.
I decided that the next time he told me he “finished the work in class” I’d force him to do it again and say, “Maybe if you have two copies of it, there will be a greater chance that one of them actually makes it to your teacher.”
Patient is a virtue I am not overly blessed with, which sometimes makes tutoring a constant internal struggle, despite how good I am at explaining things.
So I confronted him a bit on Monday afternoon. It seems like when he gets behind on his homework, he feels ashamed and doesn’t want anyone to know. So he tells us that he finished it and then maybe does or more likely DOESN’T get around to actually finishing it later. After that, I was immediately sympathetic. How can I be angry at someone for being a younger version of myself?
His mom told him not to lie to us, because we’re there to help, not to criticize. We talked about writing down all of his assignments and being more organized with books and papers. Overall I think the little talk went pretty well.
Case in point: I had been worried that FPP’s mom would be unreceptive to the idea that her son had been lying, but she came through again. The following exchange happened during our talk.
FPP’s Mom: “FPP, did you finish your social studies map?”
FPP: “Yeah.”
FPPS’s Mom: *pauses* “So you didn’t finish it.”
Ha. I guess having a BS detector finely tuned to your kid is part of being a mom.
So we created a list of all his missing and late assignments and all the new ones that are due this week, and spent 3 hours Monday afternoon working on it. Afterwards his mother emailed me and mentioned that I do the math differently (what an old story) and as a result he’s been avoiding his math homework. I feel bad about that, but also frustrated. If I ask him how he learned a concept he’ll say he doesn’t know or remember. So I’ll show him “my way” and he offers no contradiction. I obviously only know my way, so if he can’t tell me what his way his, what exactly am I supposed to do? It’s not like I remember 3 different methods for multiplying fractions. It’s been quite a few years since I settled on the one I like.
Maybe I really shouldn’t be tutoring students this young. It is just so far removed from my actual level of math knowledge.
It is also taking me an awful long time to learn how to actually deal with students. Maybe I really shouldn’t be tutoring at all.
(I could, I don’t know, get a job as an engineer. It’s just a thought.)
