What Makes an Effective English Tutor?

As someone that spent an entire four years of high school hating English class more than anything in life that ended up getting a minor in writing in college, I feel like I might be an expert on the differences between good English teaching and bad English teaching and the same principles apply to tutoring. When I was in high school, I did not get an A in English until the last quarter of senior year. It gave me my first semester grade of an A as well. It felt like a huge surprise because that is the semester where I already knew I got into college and was basically just coasting to the finish. But what was the difference? That semester, I had an English teacher that inspired my passion for reading and writing to the point where I turned it from my least favorite subject to my career.

So what was the big problem that I had before? I think one of the things that many students experience in English class in high school is a feeling that there are no real right answers and that grades are annoyingly subjective. If my grammar and spelling are right, how can you argue with the content I right without it being biased by your own feelings? My personal least favorite thing in English was symbolism because I would get Bs and Cs on my symbolism essays and then the teacher would get up and say something about how one character was symbolic of the fear of computers even though computers had not been invented when the book was published. It just made no sense to me. I felt like any grade was arbitrary, while math class was much easier because there was a clear right and wrong answer.

When I finally had a good English teacher, it was because he made me feel like he cared about me. He liked baseball just like I did and we connected over that. I felt embarrassed phoning it in when I went to class because I really wanted to impress my teacher. He started making me find more passion about texts by allowing me to write about topics that interested me, like baseball.

One of the best things that English teachers can do, in my opinion, is provide choice. I hated reading, but summer reading was my favorite because we got to choose the two books we wanted out of a list of 20 or so. On essays, it is most exciting when you can write about something that interests you. Too often, I was assigned topics and had to write about things that I did not care about. My favorite teacher let me write about baseball in an essay and his only notes on my paper were friendly disagreements with my sports opinions. On another essay, we got to compare a book with its movie version and got to choose whichever pair we wanted. It was already a cool assignment, but the freedom to choose was so much fun. I get that it makes grading harder to have lots of different topics, but allowing students to express themselves helps them engage and might inspire a passion for English and literature.