[ebuck]

Qualifications: I tutored math for about 10 years, I used to guarantee an A if you signed up with me, as long as it was still mathematically possible.

I think the roles of teacher and tutor are being confused in the "scale up" approach. Teachers have presentations that allow a large number of people to cover the material, with specific goals, verified by observing the class through testing.

A tutor covers the same ground, but in a much different manner. The tutor has an audience of one, and the goal is to fix errors in the student's understanding.

Only in a student that is ignoring the teacher will the tutor be the teacher. For every other student, the tutor assesses what the student's strengths are and what the student's weaknesses are, even if the student misreports their weaknesses.

Then the tutoring session provides explanation, guidance, and drills to fix the weaknesses. Often a weakness in solving one problem exposes underlying weaknesses, when that happens the session shifts till the underlying weakness is addressed, after which the session resumes on the upper level problem where it paused.

The rest of the tutoring is giving the student ample work which is completed under supervision, until the student builds skill. Good problem generation is often overlooked. Good problems rarely are the same problem with different numbers, good problems challenge the student to use the tools in a variety of different scenarios and problem formats. Eventually the student will tell you they understand it, and their work will support their claims.

So, watching someone else being tutored is like taking a bespoke suit and putting it on someone else. Yes, it might be wearable under some circumstances, but it's not going to properly fit the person the suit (or tutoring) was tailored to fit.

[dgacmu]

I'm a professor, and I wish more people would read your comment - and then take more advantage of tutoring, be it peer tutoring, office hours, or other resources. Tutoring is awesome and very time-efficient for the student. But also very resource-intensive for the same reason.