Most of the time we care most about kids coming up with the right answer.
The only reason a kid shows their work is because maybe they’ll get partial credit if they got the answer wrong, but got most of the process right. If they took a wrong turn on the way to getting the wrong answer.
Sometimes, in school, we want to see how our kids are thinking. In math, we ask them to notice and wonder: to unpack the things we see and what we think of them. In ELA, we ask to see their drafts: to work with them on their process, and not just mark up their final product.
In one way and another, we’re looking to make their thinking visible. To let us inside their heads, in on that messy process of figuring things out; to let us see their mistakes, their half-baked ideas, their misguided attempts—all that stuff that most of school teaches us to hide. To raise our hand only when we’re sure of the answer; to make sure we don’t get caught (by our teacher, in front of our peers) saying the wrong thing. Or the weird thing.
But when do we ever let other people into the mess inside our heads? When do we open up to anyone else the stuff we’re so unsure of—that stuff we might even be ashamed of if anyone ever saw it?
We have journals, sure, for when we want to get what’s in our minds out on paper—out of our heads so we can look at it better. But journals are private (and reading someone else’s journal is breaking their trust). And when teachers ask us to write a “reflection,” they rarely get what we’re really thinking.
Maybe when we’re talking with an old friend? A partner at the end of the day? And we use that talk to put out in front of this trusted someone an idea that’s not even an idea yet: let me run by you what I’ve been thinking.
What if we could put a pen in a student’s hand and get them believing they could use it to sketch out what they’re really thinking. A direct connection between the inside of their head and what shows up outsid
Who wants a tutor?
Back when Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor, the term likely meant something very different from what it means now. Maybe Aristotle was the person responsible for developing that whole aspect of who Alexander might be: someone who knew the things most worth knowing, who could think well about what came next. (Just like there were other tutors responsible for helping Alexander develop other dimensions of himself: to become a warrior, or horseman, or a diplomat.)
But nowadays, we send our kids to tutors when they need help understanding something they should already. Or maybe because we want them to understand even better what they’re already pretty good at. In this sense, our relationships with tutors are much more transactional. They don’t help us get more interesting (more cultured, more “well-rounded”)--to develop aspects of ourselves that otherwise might never be real.
And, as adults, we never send ourselves to tutors. The closest we get is when we know we’ll be traveling in a few months, so we find a native speaker to get us practicing how to talk in Italian or Spanish or Czech. Maybe, like Alexander, traveling outside is when we get closest to imagining how we could be a little extra, how there might be something else to us than who we usually are. (I knew someone who made a lot of money early on, and hired professors from the schools in Boston to teach her about 19th century British lit, and calculus, and the movement of the spheres. But she’s the only I ever heard of.)
But when adults connect with those kinds of tutors, they’re starting from a really different place than where kids are when they get signed up. We “assume intelligence” in the way Van Doren (a famous “man of letters” back in the day when there were such things), used to when he was teaching at Columbia:
I assumed experience even in freshmen. . . . Perhaps the chief novelty consisted in my assumption that nothing was too difficult for the students. . . . Freshmen have had more experience than they are given credit for. They have been born, had parents, had brothers and sisters and friends, been in love, been jealous, been angry, been ambitious, been tired, been hungry, been happy and unhappy, been aware of justice and injustice. Well, the great writers handled just such things; and they did so in the basic human language men must use whenever they feel and think. The result, if no teacher prevented its happening, was that the freshmen learned about themselves. And so did the teachers, at least if they read and talked like men of the world, simply and humbly, without assumptions of academic superiority.
Autobiography (1958)