Perhaps a person can actually make a good living by tutoring seniors, but I doubt it. Seniors as a group simply do not have much disposable income to spend on extras such a private tutoring. However, one can make some nice supplemental income and reap other benefits.

For instance, one of my regular clients is a woman who is learning both general computer techniques and digital image processing. She started from nothing and has enthusiastically thrown herself into it. That is a two-edged challenge. Between sessions I give her assignments to do in preparation for the next meeting. I try to follow a rational course plan to get her where she wants to be. This does not work.

At the following meeting she will not have done those things I wanted done, though she has done a whole lot of other things — some of which are more advanced and ultimately frustrating for her. If we are going to work on simple color replacement, I might find that she has been experimenting with selections and masks, but in a nearly random way. This means that before we can proceed, I need to assess what she has picked up and what things she has the wrong idea about. Then, without breaking the conversation, I try to put together a new presentation that will utilize what she now knows and backfill to pick up what she skipped. At the end of the session, I suggest some new assignments, and she happily agrees to them. Then the whole thing starts over.

She has progressed in basic skills and gained formidable self-confidence. That is rewarding to a tutor. But even more rewarding is when she sits up, turns from the monitor, and announces, “I got it! That’s neat.”

The key to advancing under these circumstances is deliberately stopping every ten minutes and reviewing what we have just done. I state the general principle and then relate it to the specific keystrokes or pointing events that she just did. At the end of the session, I review everything we did that time again combined as much as possible with the student repeating the keystrokes as we review the functions. During the lesson, I avoid taking control on the computer as much as possible, and during the reviews, I move away from it so that I will not be tempted to lend a hand. This restraint is critical. A student learns more and learns more quickly by performing the tasks. Watching someone else do it can be helpful, but is much less efficient. For reasons of economy in a large class, functions are demonstrated by an instructor, but in one-on-one tutoring, the best technique is to encourage a student to make the keystrokes necessary to accomplish the task being studied.

Exorcizing this restraint is not easy for some people who are excellent instructors in a classroom. However, there is a difference between the behavior of seniors and college-level students. The seniors are generally not in the habit of sitting and listening to an instructor. They want to do things immediately. They actually learn much more quickly by doing things than by reading or listening to a lecture. That is part of the reason that individual tutoring works for them.

It works for me when I meet one of my clients in a social situation and they rave about how much they have learned. As I said, you might not make a lot of money, but there are other rewards. Some clients even make cookies for me — real ones, like, edible.

Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.

[tags]senior computing, senior tutoring[/tags]