Picture an intimidating tutoring center, and I don’t mean a room full of gigantic textbooks or kids cracking under time pressure. Instead, you see a riveting process beginning that makes you feel like there’s an order to disorder. The student lets go of his parents’ hand and is the responsibility of the tutoring center. In the next five minutes, the student is taken to where he belongs without a blink of an eye to the outside world. The tutoring center is a hospital. The entrance of the tutoring center is congruent to an emergency room. You see a bustle of people; they’re all walking in opposite directions, avoiding each other like a frantic game of tag. The scan-in area is equivalent to ER doctors. An immediate decision is made on where the child should sit to achieve his goals for that session. Should he sit with the tutor that will encourage him to work independently or with someone that will hold his pencil for him? These are important decisions that can change the direction of the session immensely. Immediately after the child scans-in, the first tutor comes to ask, “Did you finish all your work?”. This question is lied to as often as smokers lie about their smoking habits. A lot. Not believing the child, the tutor checks his bag, just as a doctor may analyze the raspy cough a smoker exhales. Peeping into his bag, the tutor analyzes the amount of worksheets that were collected and anticipates what needs to be changed in his workload. The tutor wants the best for the child and assigns a handful of extra worksheets so they can meet their goal. The child cries and complains, just as a patient does when they’re prescribed unsavory medications.

All of this is expected to happen in five minutes, or we’ve failed. Every tutor needs to have the same urgency that a doctor treating a life threatening disease must. The tutors drive themselves to reach the maximum point of efficiency, regardless of the circumstances. Slowing down is not an option, you constantly hear from our boss “Make sure you take at least 12 kids today, or you’ll have to do extra chores”.

Frown lines emerging on our faces, we listen and produce whatever is ordered to us. Efficiency is taken to a next level here. The tutors are robots, which is the complete opposite of what they should be being taught to be. We should be trained on how to make a child crave learning. Instead, we teach our students to complete worksheets for the sake of avoiding a glare from a tired teenager. I hope that one day the tutoring center isn’t intimidating. Instead, I hope that tutors are given the time to get to know their kids, maybe have a conversation. I hope if we take more than five minutes, we haven’t failed. I hope that our goal isn’t to reach the maximum point of efficiency, but to reach a healthy point of learning.