12 reasons why school is harder now than it used to be
1) Students have so much fun wasting time on social media. Its like they brought all their friends home with them every night with their drama and problems.
2) Students never get to review their exams and see where they went wrong because teachers reuse the same exams every year and don’t want to give back exams to keep other students from cheating.
3) Teachers cannot critique students the way they used to. Teacher guidelines limit the criticism they can give in the classroom to students.
4) Teachers don’t have any time or energy left after dealing with the problem students and problem parents.
5) Student do not get any homework. If they do it is voluntary and no one holds them accountable to review it and spot opportunities for improvement.
6) The goal of school is to get students through and have them achieve whatever their baseline skill set predisposes them to achieve.
7) Where prerequisite knowledge is lacking from years before a classroom setting rarely if ever is designed to cover the gaps and move forward instead they just pile on more new information and push them along.
8) Every year we see grade 12 students that were pushed through the system that cannot add fractions. We see a regular basis gaps in learning that extend over 4 years.
9) Good kids will avoid homework because they know they are doing poorly and don’t understand why.
10) Larger class sizes of 35 or more students makes it impossible to ask questions if you have one.
11) Students get streamed into lower level classes and are mislead into thinking this is okay.
12) After grade 12 if they want to go to post secondary they have to upgrade most if not all subjects.
Math tutor helping student with homework
Top 10 reasons to GettaTutor
First of all we want you to know that we understand the predicament you are in. We send our kids to
- There is no contract to sign and you can cancel anytime.
- We supply free study support materials for all grade levels Kindergarten to Grade 12 as needed.
- We come to your home so that you don’t have to drive back and forth to homework centres. It’s no fun to sit in a parking lot and wait… and wait...and wait.
- You can get started with anyone of our easy flexible monthly packages for as little as $150 a month for one hour a week of tutoring.
- Unused hours carry forward to the next month so if your son or daughter is sick or away on vacation you don’t lose any hours.
- Our monthly packages help set good study habits with regular frequent support for exams, quizzes, tests, and assignments so that students don't fall behind in their classes.
- No payment is needed until after your first meet & greet session is complete giving you the chance to meet with your tutor and decide how you want to proceed.
- All of our tutors are awesome at what they do. If for any reason you don’t like your tutor we will send you another tutor.
- All of our tutors have passed mandatory police background checks.
- Our tutors continually assess the progress of their students and will help them learn, practice and master the material as well as get them organized, neat, and get on top of what’s going on in school.
Math tutor helping student with math homework. Pay as you go tutoring
Deciding to get a tutor is an important decision
Bad report card blues
So, let me guess your son or daughter is having a hard time with math or English in school. Maybe it's one of the tougher high school subjects like chemistry or physics that they are struggling with. But why? Why now? They did fairly well last year but this year something is off something has changed. They were sick and missed some classes or they don’t like the new teacher. Everyone in school says this teacher is tough. Maybe they just got a bad report card and your trying to figure out what to do to help them. Here is the unspoken truth most parents think and feel that it is their own "Parent " report card. Did I do enough to help my son or daughter?
Unfortunately, this predicament is all to common. We as parents and tax payers expect both the public-school system and many of us have paid extra to the private school system to help our kids learn everything they need to. We work very hard and pay our taxes and why can’t the teacher teach my son the curriculum the teachers designed for them to know? You're already pay for busing fees, dance lessons, swimming lessons, and everything to do with hockey from practices to road trips and tournaments. You don’t want to pay for another recurring expense. You're wondering if you can afford it. Your kids are busy doing everything you couldn’t afford to do as a kid and yes you are an amazing parent. Yes, if you are here reading this right here, right now, you are an amazing parent and I want you to know you are not alone. Every week we get hundreds of requests for a tutor from parents just like you who took the time to understand where we are coming from, from our experience, and what we see every day. This might be new for you, but it is an everyday situation we have been helping parents and students with for over 20 years. This is not a sales pitch. This is not a slogan. You are not buying a used car from a used car salesman. We care. We are parents ourselves. We care about our kids and we need them to build a future for themselves in a self determined career path of their own hearts desire and the end of it all be able to stand on their own two feet and support themselves financially and have some sense of resilience for this life's hardships and adversity. Then if at some point in time in the far of future they decide to have a family of their own they can afford to do that with all the bells and whistles they want in a life they worked hard to earn.
That said you have a choice to make. Should you get a tutor or just let it go? Should you invest in getting them help or write it off because you fear that they will never be able to do it? Don’t make it a coin flip decision. Lets first talk about what will happen if you don’t get a tutor. This is no fun for us to talk about but let’s have an open and honest discussion of what we have seen happen over and over again and enlighten you on our experience and the experience of other parents just like you.
1) Students get down streamed to lower level of classes in school. Yes, teachers will push your son or daughter down to a lower stream usually without any hesitation so that they can get 70s without saying that they held them back a year when in reality, as defined by the inherent difference between the complexity of subjects covered this has happened. Before you know it, they will graduate high school and realize that they have 2 years worth of upgrading to do before they can join their friends in university 2 years later and 2 years behind the friends that your teacher worked so hard to keep them with in the first place. Yes, this does happen. Every year and usually soon after every grad ceremony is over the student sits around their parent’s house trying to figure out a path to upgrade. All at a cost. With the full fledged anxiety of having to revisit a topic they did poorly in the first place without any help. What is tragic is that at this stage over half the students give up and join the minimum wage workforce with less than 5% of them pursuing an opportunity to upgrade over the next 10 years.
2) Without any help time fly's by and with one bad grade after another students start to give up. If you wait to long to get them effective help they will give up. It's only natural. Why do they give up? Students start placing value not in school but in their Facebook friends, Fortnite and anything else that they are good at but has no purposeful value that will not be productive to their future. They say Facebook, Instagram and other forms of success popularity metrics are addictive for these students it is their only success, so it becomes their focus. They would rater be posting selfies of themselves on Facebook getting likes, comparing their likes to their peers and feeling like a success rather then studying for that math test they think they are going to fail.
3) Parents cannot tutor their kids if they are struggling. They will rebel and resent you if they don’t immediately see results from your efforts with them and it’s not your fault. They will not feel independent or confident. Even if you could teach the material – if they are really struggling, they will rebel against you. You can try but if we are right please don’t fight it. It’s not worth it.
4) It is going to cost you and your son or daughter exponentially more in the long run if you don’t get a tutor than you might realize. You’re probably saying to yourself that you can’t afford it. We understand. Who wants an added expense? Here is how you should look at it if your son or daughter needs or wants the help. Are you planning on spending $12000 per year on university or post secondary tuition? With a 5-year program running $60,000. Spending $350 per month on a tutor to help them get in should seem like a drop in the bucket. Arguably it is the best investment you can make. If you don’t get them help and the give up, you have capped their earning potential at or near minimum wage for their entire lives. Was it worth it? If you wait and they start repeating classes that’s 6 months more of supporting them in the same spot when they could be moving forward.
5) Private school is a costly Band-Aid to cover up the same problem. A lot of our parents have spent over $30000 a year for the prestige of private school. Although the class sizes might be smaller it rarely works as well as private tutoring for a small percentage of the cost. That is the honest truth. It is still a classroom. Its easy to hide in a classroom. A private school teacher may spend a little more time with you, but you never have his undivided attention for more than 20 minutes. With a tutor you have them for an hour and a half ever session for a few times a week. See the difference. With a private tutor students feel like they have an edge over their peers and if they are really behind their grade level you are giving them a excellent chance to catch up and succeed.
6) Your son or daughter needs help and how they receive that help makes a big difference. Don’t send them to a crowded learning centre in a strip mall because it will take longer to get them on track than it should. Don’t send them to a homework sheet centre that you drive back and forth to which professes self directed learning – if they could have done it on their own, they would have. Recognize that they need help and recognize that the best way to deliver that help is one on one with someone who is giving them their undivided attention and planning on helping them do better and filling in any prerequisite gaps in understanding as they come up.
7) GettaTutor Today! You won’t regret it. You really wont regret it. All our plans are month to month. Give it a try for a few months. You will regret not doing it. A lot of companies dishonestly promise results. No one can promise any results. The premise is false. What we promise is that we know one on one attention is the best. If after a year you haven’t seen an improvement in their work ethic, results, and confidence then stop. You can hold your head up high that you did the best you could for your son or daughter. You are setting them up to succeed.
Ten great reasons to GettaTutor Today
1) Classroom sizes are very large and students need to learn more today than we learned 25 years ago. In these large classroom sizes it is very difficult to get “enough” help even if your son or daughter is ambitious enough to try.
2) In any grade above grade 6 teachers want to recycle exams year after year so they do not have to make a new exam every year. For this reason they do not give students their exams to take home and learn from their mistakes. This makes it almost impossible for students to improve their mark on their own.
3) Kids these days have a lot of healthy extra curricular activities. From hockey to dance and everything in between that we could offer our kids to do for fun we do. Its not that they are spoiled but studying and the art of learning, practicing and mastering their school work is naturally on the back burner because they have so much awesome stuff going on. We can help them focus on school and them into university.
4) The best thing you can do for your children is get them help with their homework, school work or exam preparation the instant that they are struggling. The reason we say this is from grades 1 through 12 knowledge grows with compound interest. If they struggled with something in grade 7 by the time they are in grade 12 it is the same problems that never got fixed in the crowded classroom are still there because nobody took the time to help them and the whole class moved on so no one talked about it. Everyday we see students in grade 12 who cannot do the material they should have learned in school in grade 8. We can help. Its never to late to help. We must all acknowledge that they need help and that is both okay and a good thing.
5) Students are more likely to be engaged and listen to a tutor when it comes to school then their own parents. Sorry parents you are wonderful people who have provided for your kids and given them the world but we know from our experience that – oh how can we put it gently – they don’t want to work on their homework with us and to be honest we could use a break.
6) The cost of university is about 10.000 per year all in when you factor tuition, books, transportation food and accommodation plus fun money. So at a grand total of about 40.000 isn't it worth it to spend a small portion of that to help them get into either the university of their choice or at least save them the embarrassment of doing academic upgrading after they don’t get into university right after high school. We help hundreds of students with academic upgrading every year as it is one of our specialties. That said we feels strongly that we should have been helping them before they fell that far behind. What a lot of parents don’t realize is that the school system basically pushes students through to the finish offering mickey mouse courses for them to take and graduate with a diploma however university and post secondary entrance requirements at reputable institutions are as high and competitive as they ever were if not higher. So what is so often the case that students get pushed through high school thinking all is well and then they cant get into university. They spend 3 or 4 years upgrading university courses without any tutoring basically spinning their tires getting no where fast. We don’t want this to happen to anyone. If you are in this boat call us because you will benefit immensely from our help.
7) We feel another contributing fact to the mess we are in these days with struggling students is social media. Now its not the same issue that people always bring up about how much time students spend on their – our point is slightly different. Social media has made students more reluctant to ask questions seek help and stand out in their class because they have been conditioned for likes and more importantly fear more now then ever the idea of looking “stupid”. 25 years ago you would ask a question in class and and if it annoyed other people in your class their would be a couple of groans and moans but that was it. Now these things get posted tracked and sent out to the masses for everyone to comment on. More importantly students who would need to ask 5 or 6 questions to sort out the issues they are having with the material will never do it. Honestly I don’t know if any of us would do it either. For this reason these days students love having a tutor they can work one on one with and ask all the questions they need privately, discreetly and without any public shaming in front of their peers.
8) The problem with having bad study habits and smart kids is that the instant the material becomes too complex usually around grade 8 to just take in after hearing the teacher talk about it is that students are left wondering what to do. They don’t know how to digest the material. Grade start dropping steadily exam over exam hovering around 50 to 60 percent and then plummet after there. Students need to learn how to work on their school work and take ownership of what they know and don’t know. Bright students benefit tremendously with help because they need to be pushed to know more and do better.
9) Going to any kind of learning center is basically pointless. There are many out their. Many that push homework sheets in large classroom settings that charge a small fortune. Again we have the problem of classroom sizes and environments and students being afraid to ask questions. Students really need one on one help to help them with what they are struggling with. Our analogy for this is if you had a cold….would you want to be treated in a room full of people who were also sick or would you be better served by a doctor who could examine you individually and diagnose what your issue is. Group settings don’t work when we need individual help. Homework sheets from learning centres do not help when we already have homework that we are struggling with.
10) GettaTutor.com offers one on one help in the comfort of your own home. Choose one of our great monthly packages or simply pay as you go tutoring. Do your son or daughter a favor and get them the right help that will benefit them the rest of their life. A few hundred dollars in tutoring when they get through university successfully the first try and find gainful employment thereafter is worth its weight in gold. Honestly don’t avoid seeking help – after so many years of doing this we know one thing for sure – it can't possibly get better on its own.
Your son or daughter will actually start doing their homework. This is a big deal for nearly all of our parents. They will start paying attention to exam dates, quizzes and their results and start reflecting on what they did right and what they did wrong.
At GettaTutor.com we do not believe in doing assessments on our students because if we did our own assessments they would be biased. All that matters to us at GettaTutor is doing better where it counts - on exams, report cards, and GPA's. You tell us what subjects you’re doing poorly in and we will send you an expert who can help you learn, practice, and master that material.
Subjects We Tutor
For Kindergarten through grade 12 we tutor these 4 key subjects in all provinces.
- Language Arts
- Math
- Social Studies
- Science
In most provinces the courses become more specific in grade 11 & 12. Below is a list of subjects we tutor every day listed By Province For Grade 12 Level.
Alberta
- English 30-1
- English 30-2
- Social Studies 30-1
- Social Studies 30-2
- Biology 30
- Chemistry 30
- Physics 30
- Science 30
- Math 30-1
- Math 30-2
- Math 30-3
- Math 31
BC
- English 12
- English Literature 12 Pre-Calculus 12
- Foundations of Mathematics 12 Apprenticeship and Workplace Mathematics2
- Biology 12
- Chemistry 12
- Physics 12
- Applications of Physics 12
- Geography 12
- History 12
- Social Justice 12
- Manitoba
- Applied Math (40S)
- ELA Comprehensive (40S)
- ELA Transactional (40S)
- Essential Math (40S)
- Pre-Calculus Math (40S)
- Accounting Systems (40S)
- Biology (40S)
- Introduction to Calculus (45S)
- Chemistry (40S)
- Credit for Employment (40G)
- Family Studies (40S)
- German (40S)
- Law (40S)
- Physics (40S)
- Psychology (40S)
- World Geography: A Human Perspective (40S)
Ontario
- English 12, University Preparation
- English 12, College Preparation
- English 12, Workplace Preparation
- Biology 12, University Preparation (SBI4U)
- Chemistry 12, University Preparation (SCH4U)
- Math 12 Advanced Functions (MHF4U)
- Math 12 Calculus and Vectors (MCV4U)
- Math 12 Data Management (MDM4U)
- Math 12 College and Apprenticeship (MAP4C)
- Math 12 For College Technology (MCT4C)
- Math 12 For Everyday Life (MEL4E) Physics 12, University Preparation (SPH4U)
- Physics 12, College Preparation (SPH4C)
- Science 12, University/College Preparation (SNC4M)
- Science 12, Workplace Preparation (SNC4E)
- General Social Sciences 12: Challenge and Change in Society, University Preparation (HSB4U)
- World History: The West and the World (CHY4U)
Saskatchewan
- English Language Arts 30
- Pre-Calculus 30 Foundations of Mathematics 30
- Workplace and Apprenticeship Mathematics 30
- Biology 30
- Chemistry 30
- Physics 30