Why do I need to send the assignment before Tutoring?

You may be used to lower-level tutoring, like for calculus. Your calculus tutor likely never required you to send the assignment before scheduling.

You may be wondering, now that you’re learning more advanced subjects, why you need to send the assignment before scheduling for a tutoring appointment.

Think of calculus as a set of topics, like “How to compute limits at infinity” and “how to find the maximum of a function” and so on. Suppose that we abbreviate the topics as A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, so that maybe B is the topic “how to compute limits”, or however we define the topics.

Upper level courses are not Standardized

Calculus is extremely standardized. If you take a calculus course in Orlando, and someone else takes it in Juneau, both courses are going to cover A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J.

Upper-level math is not nearly as standardized. If you take a course in real analysis, you might cover A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, and J, then someone else in a different course, also titled “real analysis”, might cover B, F, H, I, J, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X.

I cannot know what I need to teach you, just by knowing that the course title is “real analysis”. It’s also not enough to see the syllabus, because syllabus descriptions are often very broad. I have to see the assignment in order to know what you need to know.

By contrast, if you tell me that you’re studying calculus, then I already know exactly what you need to learn. That’s why this isn’t necessary for courses like calculus.

So if you want help in more advanced subjects, and don’t show me the exercises, I might fail to teach you everything that you need to know for your course.

Conversely, I might assume that you need to know certain topics, and teach them to you, when you don’t need to know them.

I may need to Brush Up

Suppose that you’re studying real analysis, and right now you need to learn topic X.

I’ve tutored real analysis every semester for the last five years. I’ve seen topics A through W just last semester. But I haven’t see X in over five years, because most classes choose not to cover it.

Therefore, I need to go re-learn X, before I can talk to you about it.

Seeing the exercises, tells me ahead of time which topics I may need to brush up on.

Some Exercises are Hard

Some of these topics are hard. Even if I have very recently taught topic X, it’s still possible to find some very tricky exercise problems regarding X. I might need an hour to figure out the solution.

If you’ve scheduled to meet with me for an hour, and I spend that hour just trying to come up with one solution to one problem, and don’t entirely finish, I’ll feel as though I have done a bad job — and likely, you will too.

I don’t want that; you don’t want that. So please let me figure out the problems in advance, and then we can talk about them.

Help me to do a good job

Some courses are standardized enough that I can probably tutor them without seeing the exercises in advance. But I’d rather not take the chance.

So please, help me to help you. Send the exercises, every time that you want to make an appointment.

Depending on how busy I am with other subjects, I may need a day or two to look over the exercises, before I’m ready to schedule. If you delay sending the material, then I may not be able to meet when you need to.