Tutorial—Good Vision, Loose Enforcement

Tutorial%E2%80%94Good+Vision%2C+Loose+Enforcement

Jason Zheng, Editor

Tutorial, while on paper a great way to help out stressed students, is a system that cannot and will not ever be fully utilized by all PCS students.

When asked, pretty much any PCS student will say that tutorial is the best thing since late Friday morning—there is a genuine consensus that tutorial is good for relieving homework and study stress. It’s a good time for students to ask for teacher and tutor guidance amidst an otherwise busy, unrelenting schedule of academics, sports and other extracurriculars. For many, it is time much needed to get straggling and future homework assignments done. So what’s the issue?

Well, many students just don’t take tutorial seriously.

A quick glance at sign-out sheets reveals that most students do not document their migrations and a brief look in pretty much any classroom suggests a phone-and-social period. Relatively few students actually seek out teacher and tutor help with a majority of students using the period as a break from their other classes.

I spend most of my tutorial hours outdoors because more often than not, work inside the classrooms is accompanied by non-academic chatter and unrelated distractions which, I’ll admit, under certain circumstances are not necessarily bad things. But when it comes down to it, tutorial is a time for studying and tutoring and I find that I am most productive when I have minimal distractions.

In the end, tutorial is just too loosely organized—don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the problem is that students aren’t signing out of their classrooms or that we should make tutorial a strict, enforced class for studying, rather, I believe that students and teachers ought to collaborate to designate specific study groups in designated locations (like the seventh and eighth grade grade-wide finals study sessions) and have students be able to choose whether or not to attend these study groups. No matter what, there will always be some students who will not want to attend these groups but having the study sessions as an option allows more motivated/ group oriented students to have a focused place to study. By designating study sessions with an advisory-level of classroom organization and still allowing students a tutorial-level freedom of where to go, both students who want to study and those who want some time to relax can be happy.