My tutor just met with me and she made me do a practice math section and then went over the problems while using the CB explanations instead of showing me her strategies and tricks, which made it very hard to understand. I’m not sure whether to continue or stop these sessions, because it seems she is going off of what CB says instead of letting me know what she thinks, I can do that by myself.
I would definitely recommend Mike McClenathan’s PWN the SAT blog and his book too. You want strategies and tips? He’s got them! I have all my students buy the book. They really like it.
thank you very much, does it help with the scores?
Yes, absolutely. Mike is amazing. If you read through his book and do the practices and you still don’t understand how he is doing it, he has the pencil work written out in the solutions at the back of the book. PS: (It sounds like you are not thrilled with your tutor; I can attest that there are lots of different tutors with different teaching styles. There’s no such thing as tutoring school; we all tutor our own way.)
Yes I just feel that a tutor shouldn’t need to look at CB explanations and should be able to offer me a clear explanation to the problem and offer me quicker solutions, instead she made more confused while explaining problems.
It sounds like you have answered your own question. One other thing to look for: are you at least periodically taking timed real practice tests (or at least sections) so that you can assess whether you are improving? This process should not have to take over your entire life and you should see improvement certainly within weeks.
Books and tutors are two different things. It is a good idea to buy books and use them as … source books. The best approach is to have a number of them and refer to the tips and strategies AS YOU PROCEED to your OWN preparation.
Tutors fall into a much different group. Those are the people who should help develop the right approach (one that FITS you) and should be able to answer YOUR questions without having to rely on the advice offered in books, be it from the TCB abysmal advice or a different author.
Simply stated, if you want to give that tutor another chance, take a couple of sections, mark all your correct answers where you guessed, and all incorrect answers, and ask the tutor to SHOW you how to solve them in his or her own words. If he or she pulls out books or notes, fire the tutor on the spot. Repeat the exercise with any private tutor your parents are thinking to hire.
Tutors are valuable to establish an adequate strategy or fill gaping hopes in the knowledge. The work, however, is all the student’s responsibility. The more one does, the better the relationship with the tutor will be.
As xiggi said, the value of a tutor is that you have someone who can watch what you are doing and help guide you in methods that will work specifically for you. Part of this means that the tutor should be asking you questions about how you are approaching questions, why you are doing it in that particular way, etc. In other words they should be trying to understand the way you think and of course they should be giving you their own personal feedback on all of that, not reading explanations from a book (especially not the BB explanations for crying out loud!!!).
You should definitely try someone else. It sounds like you can find someone better, but if you are not sure you could always try someone else before letting the other tutor go just so that you have a basis for comparison and don’t feel like you are making the wrong decision.